Bal (Honey)
dir. Semih KaplanoÄźlu Turkey/Germany / 2010 / 103 min. / 1.85:1 World Premiere: Berlinale (2010)
Captivating both in the soft-spoken, sensual power of its ritualistic narrative exploration and for its value as a living cultural document of a rapidly vanishing way of life, Bal shepherds us into a seemingly timeless agrarian community balanced just on the cusp of drastic existential sea change. Director KaplanoÄźlu immerses us in a kind of handmade, frontier reality already the stuff of folklore in much of the Westernized world, the kind of life where symbiotic relationships between man and all constituents of the natural world are delicately, almost religiously maintained. Falcons are trained and raised as integral members of the family. Â Honeybee populations are guarded and intuitively tracked in order to cultivate their honey, which likewise instills a reverence for the venerable mountain forest where they construct their hives, and so on and so forth. Naturally this fragile interdependence also means dire consequences when even one component of the ecological circuitry is distressed. Â Â
Uncertainty enters into the lives of one such family in the remote forestland of Turkey when the year’s honey harvest, their main source of income, is inexplicably lacking. When the patriarch fails to return from a venture deep into the woods in search of the missing bee colonies, the life of the family’s young son Yusuf is turned upside-down. Certainly we’re all conscious of the recent bee colony collapse crisis and its impact on industrialized farming outfits, but when the same phenomenon is wrought upon an unsuspecting, isolated village with a tradition of sustainable practices, the effect arrives as a more ominous force entirely, a change in fortune bordering on the supernatural.  Â
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlinale, Bal’s richly hued cinematography is awash in deep amber tones and seems instinctively in touch with the spellbinding stillness of the place.  The third installation in what is now referred to as the Yusuf Trilogy, so called for the character that serves as its continuous through-line, provides a stunning portraiture of its namesake as a young boy, struggling to grasp the dramatic changes hovering ever nearer with each fading season.
- Christopher Holmes













