Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 11 Oct only @ 18.00
Markus Imhoof / Switzerland, Germany, Austria / 2012 / 96 mins
The big finish to Take One Action‘s 2013 festival turns out to be surprisingly small – the size of a common insect. Markus Imhoof‘s More Than Honey is the final screening (bar the Audience Award winning Girl Rising), and it is a pleasingly low-key exploration of the humble honey bee and its enormous impact.
Einstein once claimed that if bees died out, humans would follow only four years later. As world bee populations have begun to decline, More Than Honey offers some insight into the causes of this epidemic. Audiences meet the itinerant commercial beekeeper who hauls his hives around America, a third-generation Alpine beekeeper obsessed with the “racial purity” of his hive, a Chinese worker who pollinates flowers by hand in a region where bees have died out completely and an enthusiastic proponent of “killer bees“, and a family of researchers working to create a hardier strain of bees. And of course there are the bees – sparkling cinematography takes us right into the hives for an entirely new perspective.
More Than Honey is a triumph as documentary and nature film, a moving reminder of the interdependence of the world’s ecosystems at a time when we haven’t yet learned the cost of modern industrial practices.
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