When MORE THAN HONEY opens with a sweet-old bearded grandfatherly type walking through mountainous countryside there’s a distinct WTF moment. What on earth is this pleasant but hardly cutting-edge nature doco about bees doing in the Audi Festival of German Films?
But then we learn that all is not well in the world of bees: they are slowly dying out and no one is sure why. Oscar nominated documentary maker Marcus Imhoof, grandson of a professional beekeeper, therefore goes on a global mission to find out, and in the process we are sucked into the fascinating world of bees, one where metaphors abound, philosophical questions are raised, and there is death on an industrial scale.
First stop is a massive almond farm in California, where hundreds of thousands of bees have been trucked in to pollinate the almond trees. So far so good, though the bee company owner’s paean to capitalism is incongruous while surrounded by endless acres of almond blossom. Then we see the trees, and of course the pollinating bees, sprayed by fungicide, so it’s no surprise to us that after the bees have been shuttled around the United States on more jobs the bee company owner discovers that most of them have died.
We feel unduly saddened by these deaths because by now we’ve become quite attached to the humble bee.
Interspersed between the search for source of the bee population’s woes are intriguing vignettes on the lifecycle of bees, the roles of the drones, how honey is made, and what exactly the queen bee is. In short, the bees start to seem almost human and the scenes where they are attacked by parasites (which on a human scale are equivalent in size to a rabbit, albeit a nasty bloodsucking one) are heartbreaking.
However, in lighter moments the doco reveals a wealth of interesting facts. For example, did you know that bees smell in stereo?
Existentialist issues are also raised. For example, given that each hive contains 50,000 bees and each bee has a distinct role to play, is the community itself the actual organism not each bee? And some of the metaphors that spring to mind are disturbing, such as when an interloper bee is identified and killed.
Apart from the US the film visits other destinations such as China (where some areas are totally devoid of bees and fruit trees have to be manually pollinated) and Australia, which may well be the bees’ last hope of avoiding extinction.
This absorbing and thought-provoking film will make you think twice about eating honey. After seeing it, it’s almost anachronistic that a family table staple is the result of an insect’s energetic endeavours.
MORE THAN HONEY plays at the Audi Festival of German Films in Sydney on Wednesday 8 May and the festival’s closing night on Tuesday 14 May.
(C) Roger Balch
7th May, 2013
Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- MORE THAN HONEY, Audi Festival of German Films, Sydney Arts Guide, Roger Balch