Coming from the Balkans, this imaginative animation deals quite philosophically with the war and its impact on young people who were forced to join the army. The director’s choice of textures and colours along with the unusual camera movements and careful sound design create an exquisite visual style.
Rada Šešić

Hatidze is not alone. She has her bees. And she nurses her sick, bedridden mother. Every now and then she packs her jars of honey and homemade baskets and goes to the market in the capital, where she flirts with the sellers, treats herself to a hair dye and enjoys escaping the loneliness of her Macedonian mountain idyll for a moment: being, for a short while, nothing but a single woman around fifty, free from all her routine burdens and ready to enjoy life. In her remote, barren mountain village she hardly has time for this, because there she is devotedly breeding bee colonies in crevices. As a bee whisperer, she sings old folksongs to her charges, needs no head or hand protection and takes only the honey she is entitled to, leaving the rest to the bees. They are her family. But when a nomad clan with seven kids and 150 cows suddenly settles on the neighbouring property, her lonely idyll is in danger of being shattered.

The two directors Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska have condensed roughly 400 hours of film material in a poetic, intense drama that is much more than just the portrait of a beekeeper. Between observation and metaphor, they follow Hatidze through ups and downs. In her world it’s the bees that decide who will be allowed to stay in the end.

Julia Weigl

“Monuments are good for nothing.” As monuments and museums rise around the fixed camera’s field of vision, “SK 2014” deconstructs a regime’s absurdity. The absurdity of its reading of the political, its need to mythologise itself, its absurd stones. Even in the rhythm of Offenbach, it is the graveyard of a community. Though it may appear grandiose to some.
Kumjana Novakova

In a small provincial town the women work while most of the men are unemployed. Whatever their education women can only work in the local factory as seamstresses. Their small salary does not allow them to buy even one of the blouses they make. The film intelligently questions what good globalisation brings us and what may become of our dreams.
Rada Šešić