One would expect a country that has only received one other Oscar nomination in its 30-year history – in the now-distant 1995 – to be pretty happy about getting two in the same year. At first glance, the double nomination for Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign Language Film clinched last week by the Macedonian documentary Honeyland, a poignant account of the life of a self-standing female honey-maker living under sub-optimal conditions in an isolated village with her dying mother, has made North Macedonia ecstatic.
And yet, amidst all the outpouring of collective euphoria, one can also identify a small yet impossible-to-miss share of local hostility towards this – in the words of The Guardian – “miraculous feat”. How come?
One particularly cynical – and rather lazy – explanation would be Macedonians’ alleged predisposition towards envy. As one highly common local proverb would put it, Macedonians simply tend to “wish death on the neighbor’s cow” („да му умре кравата на комшијата“) – i.e., desire misfortune upon other people.
In this stereotype-laden view of Macedonian society, it is hardly a surprise if the average person in the country is unimpressed with Honeyland’s success: they are simply unable to be happy for anyone else, even for a compatriot. And they might not even see the honey-maker as a compatriot. Multiple social media posts suggest that some ethnic Macedonians do not believe the life of an ethnically Turkish woman – albeit born in North Macedonia and proficient in the Macedonian language – should be the subject of a Macedonian movie.
Fortunately, shameful reasoning like this is comparatively rare. The bulk of the recent anti-Honeyland rhetoric in the country, while not always intelligently articulated, touches on two other (much more interesting) questions:
- Does Honeyland portray North Macedonia in a bad light?
- If yes, is this a problem?
To answer the first question, we need to establish what it means for a movie to portray its subject in a bad light. Is this more likely to occur when the audience knows next to nothing about the topic?
It is this last point many of the local social-media qualms are fixated on: Hollywood can afford to criticize America, the reasoning goes, because everyone knows enough about America not to be swayed by a single movie. But if Honeyland is your only teacher on what life in North Macedonia looks like, you could easily develop a mental image of the country as a medieval relic in Europe where people still live without electricity.
While not entirely unconvincing, this argument is weak because it places virtually no faith in the audience. Doesn’t watching a good movie about a country you’ve only just heard of make you want to learn more about the place? Isn’t this the whole point of having a foreign film category at the Oscars? And even if there are people out there who will irresponsibly make up their minds about a whole country just from watching a single movie, are these really the kind of people who would spend two hours watching a documentary about a rural honey-maker?
Finally, if one casts the movie’s social critique aside, which many viewers might actually do, Honeyland doesn’t depict North Macedonia in a bad light to begin with. In fact, one of the greatest strengths of the documentary is the myriad of breathtaking landscape shots of Macedonian nature, which are bound to boost the country’s tourism for years to come. Thus, the answer to the first question above is clearly a resounding “no”.
But given the prevalence of the ‘bad light’ concern in the public discourse, one might as well play the devil’s advocate and examine the second question.
So, let’s zoom out of Honeyland and North Macedonia for a second and ask ourselves this: should movie directors – especially ones that want to be nominated for international awards by their countries – care about what their work says about these countries? This question is so misguided that it only makes sense in the context of what is essentially a “society of cheerleaders”, where the epitome of a cultural contest is Eurovision, and the definition of good art is art that puts a smile on people’s faces.
It doesn’t take an expert to recognize that most of the Oscar favorites of the past decade have also dealt with severely negative – embarrassing, if you like, social phenomena. Was Green Book’s director meant to worry that the world might think everyone in America is racist after watching his movie? And to take the argument to its logical extreme, did Spotlight mean to imply that America is a nation full of pedophiles? Of course not.
But this bizarre and quasi-patriotic reasoning (accidentally) touches on another valuable question: what does it say about Macedonian cinema that most of its products over the past three decades have treated, for lack of a better word, negative subjects?
To be sure, North Macedonia is an underdeveloped (post)transitional society, where the creative agendas of moviemakers are inevitably shaped by some grim societal realities. But take neighboring Serbia, which has suffered a much thornier (and certainly bloodier) transition from socialism, and yet has managed to produce some highly uplifting masterpieces over the past two decades. For instance, what is North Macedonia’s equivalent of some cult gems from the early 2000s, such as Munje (Dudes) or Profesionalac (The Professional)? Both of these pictures are unmistakably set during Slobodan Milosevic’s 1990s, yet the only reason they look at the regime is so they can laugh in its face.
More often than not, cinema is constrained by reality, but it is usually at its best when it seeks to subvert reality and provide some unlikely silver linings. In the short history of Macedonian cinema, however, Honeyland’s adorable rural honey-maker joins a long list of protagonists – most of them at least 40 years old – who are depicted as clear ‘transition losers’ with no glimmer of hope for the future.
Of course, this is not something Honeyland’s directors should feel guilty of. Each individual artist can be held accountable for their own product and their own product only – and if the world is calling this particular product a “miraculous feat” and awarding it two Oscar nominations, that debate is probably settled.
But the boundaries of the individual and the collective are somewhat porous in the world of art. Should the average Macedonian feel proud of the artistic success of two individuals – Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov – just because they happen to be their fellow countrymen?
Well, Honeyland’s creators would almost certainly say yes. In their documentary, every time their heroine collects the honey produced by her bees, she leaves as much as half of it uncollected. Half for them, half for me, she keeps repeating. Thanks to her selflessness, the bees can feed themselves and eventually produce more honey. Thanks to Honeyland, the golden age of Macedonian cinema may have just begun.
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