About Honeyland
The last wild beekeeper in the mountains of North Macedonia tends to her hives and her bedridden mother in a stone village with no running water, until a Turkish family with seven children and a herd of cows moves in next door. Shot over three years in available light and the first film ever to be Oscar-nominated for both documentary and international feature in the same year.
Released in 2019 and running a tight 1h 29m, Honeyland sits firmly in the documentary tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated NR and presented in Macedonian, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov
Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Honeyland is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Hatidze Muratova — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Honeyland
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- New York, NY — listed at 4 independent cinemas.
- Chapel Hill, NC — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Montpelier, VT — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Monica, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Albuquerque, NM — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Campbell, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Pasadena, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Ann Arbor, MI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Osage, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Painted Post, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Honeyland is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 29m documentary work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Documentary genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.