About film

The film "Honey Hunters" directed by Krystian Matysek presents the revival of traditional wild-bee keeping, the secrets of urban beekeeping and the fascinating life of bees.

"Honey Hunters" is a life story of bees and men. The swarm has to be in constant movement in order to live. In order to bottom the mysteries of the life of bees and to show them to the audience, the camera enters a contemporary hive and a traditional wild beehive carved in the trunk of an age-old tree. It roams across fields, wild forests, mountains and... the big cities of Europe and Asia.

The life of every hive is the Cosmos in miniature - it has its eternal rules. The viewer will finally see the birth of a bee, how the worker bees take care of the queen bee and how they fight with intruders to protect their hive (often for life and death). And how does a bee see nature and people - a single bee that drudges from dawn till sunset and the thousands of bees that would do anything to sustain their hive.

Magdalena Popławska, an actress of an avant-garde theatre, interested in ecology and a healthy lifestyle wants to learn the tradition and secrets of wild-bee keeping. We accompany her on her journey to Augustów in Poland, Bashkortostan in the Russian Federation and to Nepal. We learn wild-bee keeping and get to know the incredible relationship between bees and people.

Accompanied by Kamil Baj, an urban beekeeper, we travel across apiaries set up on the roofs of Warsaw buildings. We follow film to France, where we can admire the Paris hives installed on the roof of the Notre Dame cathedral.

For many million years bees have been laboriously building the natural environment of our planet. Today they are dying on an unprecedented scale. Urban beekeeping and reintroducing the tradition of wild-bee keeping - keeping wild bees in forests - seems one of the ways of saving them. Maybe reaching for the past, the original environment and the model of coexistence of bees and people - for wild-bee keeping - can help us find a way? The film is an attempt of answering this question. Traditional bartniks (wild-bee keepers) and beekeepers can communicate despite the barriers of languages, cultures and centuries - because they have been watching the wisdom of bees with diligence and because they can learn from them.

 

Title	Honey hunters / Łowcy miodu
Duration	56’ (75’)
Genre	documentary film