Fantastic photography and a strong central character drive the Oscar-finalist documentary Honeyland

 The 2019 Oscar-finalist documentary from Macedonia, Honeyland, is driven by outstanding photography and by its rare access into the lives of some rural people living on the margins of the modern world; we follow a 50something woman, Hatidze, who scrounges out a meager living for herself and her mother, by tending to several swarms of bees and bottling and selling the honeycombs wholesale to local farmers' markets. She's entrepreneurial and very devoted to the care of her grievously ill mother - but it's hard to fathom that she's living in the 21st century - it comes as a shock when she rides a train to the closest city to sell her wares. The dramatic content to the film, such as there is, occurs when a family of immigrants from Turkey take over a small dwelling alongside H's primitive quarters. This family turns out to be intrusive, crude, abusive, and dishonest - eventually nearly destroying H's apiary - a happenstance that is all the more sorrowful as she does seem to enjoy having company and she's especially warm w/ the children. So, as a drama, the story line is a bit slack - though we do get a close-up look at a life and a way of life far removed from the lives of most cineasts. But what drives the film are, first, the strong character of Hatidze, a survivor of many hardships and likely to survive many more (we have to wonder how the filmmakers, Tamara Kotevska and Ljudomir Stefanov, found her, why she agreed to lay her life bare for the filmmakers, and how the film has changed her life, it at all), and second, some truly extraordinary photography - notably the opening sequence that shows her climbing a cliff and rock face to get to one of her hives and the many film in the dimly lit stone hovel where H lives w/ her mother - these shots looking every bit as beautiful as a Rembrandt nightscape.