A month after Europe experienced the hottest June in history, a train full of children travelled from Berlin to Oranienburg (a town on the outskirts of the German capital), taking the Fridays for Future cause across towns. Some ticketless and most unaccompanied by their parents, they sang and sloganeered in the train as an eight-year-old girl raised a placard that read, ‘Let’s make this world Greta again’.
As the school strike for the climate — started by Greta Thunberg, 16, in Sweden last year — snowballed into a global movement recently, critics and sceptics pointed out the privilege of its participants. Pitting them against indigenous communities, the accusation was that the natives have been fighting climate change away from media attention.
But a few films in 2019 — and the line-up at the recently-concluded 21st Mumbai Film Festival — have not just highlighted the contributions and struggles of indigenous communities, but also moved beyond traditional disaster narratives and didactic documentaries.
The sting in Honeyland
The North Macedonian entry to the 92nd Academy Awards, Honeyland , is one such film. Bagging the top award at the 2019 Sundance film festival — World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary — Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s feature, opens with an imposing aerial shot of green pastures.
Hatidze Muratova, the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers, a woman in her mid-50s, cuts through the frame, wearing a traditionally indigenous yellow garment, occupying a minuscule presence in the landscape. The shot conveys her inconsequentiality in the grand scheme of things, but as the film proceeds, her life and efforts emerge as parabolic of what’s happening around the world.
A still from Honeyland
Living in isolation with an ageing mother, she collects honey for sustenance. “Half for you, half for me,” she says to the bees affectionately, as she fills her jars with the golden liquid and heads to the city to sell them. Until, one day, a nomadic family of seven rambunctious children and a herd of cattle settle near her hut.
Initially, she welcomes their arrival but soon there’s conflict as the patriarch of the family takes more honey than can be sustainably replenished. “The story tells you how greediness works on a very simple level; how it provokes more greediness, leading to damage,” observes Stefanov. “All the environmental problems we have today are because of that kind of greediness on a different level.”
Shot over three years, the documentary was initially commissioned to be a short environmental film on traditional wild beekeepers. But as Kotevska and Stefanov spent a couple of months with Muratova, they discovered a potential for a feature that finds relevance in the ongoing global discourse on sustainability.
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov
But the film is more than an environmental lesson. Shot over three years, Honeyland captures a haunting sense of isolation of indigenous people, where Muratova imagines the rest of her life in solitude with her dying mother. Contained in a candle-lit hut, the directors are privy to Muratova’s moment of grief when that moment finally arrives. The big question for the duo was whether to film a moment as private as the death of a loved one. “It was the hardest to shoot but she called us when her mother was dying and we shot for 10 minutes and walked away,” says Stefanov.
It is an ethical dilemma documentary filmmakers and journalists often grapple with — whether to step in in a moment of crisis or chronicle it at a distance. For instance, how a toddler being hounded by bees is filmed without intrusion. “We chose not to intervene because we were not there as humanitarians, but documentarians,” says Kotevska. “Even if we got involved, is would only be momentary and we would eventually leave.”
- The 69th Berlin International Film Festival’s NATIVe section (showcasing indigenous cinema) opened with Vai . The film was made collectively by eight indigenous female filmmakers from seven different Pacific countries: Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Kuki Airani (Cook Islands), Samoa, Niue and Aotearoa (New Zealand). Their attempt was to decolonise the screen and showcase how the female gaze on these environments and its inhabitants can add to the conversation on climate crisis.
Power battles
This sense of distance is also palpable in Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come , which won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
A portrait of the Galician countryside, the film starts and ends with the destruction of a forest. At the start, a bulldozer razes a thick forest in pitch darkness, and in the end an uncontrollable forest fire wrecks havoc. The rest of the film is meditative and observational, where the quietude is interjected by fleeting moments of ‘modernity’ brought by cars and tourists. “This is where my grandparents grew up, and there is a rage that this world is disappearing and their (grandparents’) values are dying. For me, telling that in a poetic way, is political,” says Laxe, during a conversation in Mumbai.
A still from Fire Will Come
While the rebellion of the Galician residents lies in silently inhabiting the forest, Bacurau , which won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year, showcases a violent takedown of infiltrators in a secluded and traditional Brazilian village. The Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles film could read as an allegorical statement in support of indigenous communities claiming their rightful resources, as powerful white people, armed with drones and guns, exert their power.
Changing climate narratives
The discourse around the environment and sustainability in cinema is not just finding validation at film festivals in 2019, but is also drawing in new voices.
Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, director of Two Popes , announced at MAMI that his next film will explore climate change. “I try to be hopeful but due to this climate crisis our future is in danger,” he says.
The attempt with cinema, for Meirelles, as with other environmentally-conscious filmmakers, is to break away from Hollywood’s doomsday narrative and bring hope, advocate for introspection, and show the global audience where humanity is headed.
