In the weeks before all the shutdowns and my daughter coming home from university for spring break–and now staying, to our relief–I decided to give myself a day’s mini-filmfest break as a reward for doing taxes. By the time I looked up from the 1040 checklist, though, nothing I really wanted to sit through was still playing at any of the theaters, and I’d missed both The Farewell and Uncut Gems. And now the theaters are closed.
Since I’m not on one of the streaming services, I took advantage of my local library DVD collections before the libraries, like everything else, decided to close. If you can stream these and you like thoughtful movies with food somewhere in the mix of topics and character sketches, they’re all worth watching.
First is Oscar-nominated foreign documentary Honeyland. I’d missed its limited run at my local independent theater only the week before (taxes, as mentioned), so when I spotted it at the library I snatched it up along with two others that were also surprising finds.
Honeyland follows Hatidze Muratova, possibly the last traditional wild beekeeper who, in her fifties, lives alone with her bedridden, elderly mother in a one-room stone hut, part of an abandoned village outside Skopje, Macedonia. She takes the regional bus into town on market days to sell the jars of honey she’s harvested from beehives in the rocks and gets a good price for them, but it’s still just enough to buy groceries with. Then a large, noisy family moves their cattle into the abandoned homestead next door and she makes friends with them, helping with the younger children. The father, ambitious to make a go of things, tries beekeeping himself, but ignores her advice for handling his box hives gently, gets a bad price at market and contracts bulk sales he can’t deliver to an aggressive and ruthless middleman. His hives start to fail, and the hungry bees attack her carefully fostered hives while his neglected cattle start dying. Eventually the family gives up and moves on, having squandered much of their own living as well as what she relied on–but not all.
Honeyland is fascinating just for its portrait of Hatidze, her resilience and her forthright, cheerful way of dealing with both bees and people. She and her mother live on the absolute brink, in a hut with a Franklin stove, a few cats, no other neighbors and very little food. Most of their daily diet is just cooked grain and yogurt or ayran and she still feeds the scraps to the cats. But she makes the most of everything she can.
When she goes to the city market she brings back some bananas and watermelon to tempt her mother to eat and enjoy a few bites of sweetness. She has just her one yellow dress and her kerchief, and no one to appreciate them, but while she’s in Skopje she spends two euros on a bottle of hair dye just for herself, and once home, she combs it through her hair with a sense of satisfaction, as though she were being pampered at a salon, while she chats with her mother about old times. Even at the end of the film, you get the feeling that Hatidze will find a way to prosper.
You do wonder a little how this documentary was achieved–they found room to fit a camera inside the tiny hut as she feeds her mother and helps her turn over on the bed, they filmed the bees stinging the neighbor’s children and his calves weakening and dying in the yard, they filmed the neighbor and the businessman raiding a nearby wild hive Hatidze relies on, just to supplement their jar count–how did the filmmakers get all that? What happened afterward?
Sometimes an extraordinary documentary like this weaves its way into your imagination more intriguingly than fiction, and sometimes the filmmaking unintentionally affects the subjects and becomes its own kind of quasi-fiction just by the nature of what it shows, what it doesn’t, and what’s behind the scenes. Did she stay or go? You have to ask, you have to wonder. The filmmakers do actually answer many of these questions on the Honeyland website, but you have to poke around and follow the press kit link to download the “press notes” PDF–a fascinating read.
The next film, Ramen Shop, is fiction and a bit slighter, but still with some pretty good moments. A young ramen chef working for his hard-as-nails father in Japan arrives at the shop one morning to learn that his father has died of a sudden heart attack. The son consults his uncle, who also works for the shop, about his childhood in Singapore with his Chinese mother, who died young, and the impossibility of recreating the soup she used to make him. Against his uncle’s advice, he decides to go back in search of the recipe and his mother’s family. Continue reading
Filed under: history, movies | Tagged: food, movies | Comments Off on Three Films on Food and Memory
Slow Food Fast 