Bal by Semih Kaplanoglu

Sun playing with shadows in a glade, light finding its way through foliage. A distant sound of someone walking, twigs snapping under feeet. Slowly, a horse enters the picture. And a few gentle moments later, his master. He stops, looks up into the trees, and a drop of honey falls on his finger. He licks it. It’s all very exciting.

After Egg and Milk, Honey is the last film in Semih Kaplanoglu’s backwards-in-time trilogy about Yusuf. Set in a divine forest landscape in the mountains, it follows young Yusuf at the age of 6, eating his breakfast in silence with his mom and dad, struggling to learn how to read in school. His father is a honey collector and Yusuf’s greatest hero.

When Yusuf doesn’t want to drink his milk, his dad gladly empties the glass. When Yusuf doesn’t want to speak, his dad leans over the kitchen table and says ”you can whisper if you want”. Together they wander in utopia, whispering, looking for bees and honey in the magic forest. But one day his father disappears, and Yusuf has no one to whisper with anymore.

Words are rare in Honey, even the whispered ones. Communication is almost annoyingly subtle. Milisecond smiles, talking eyes, invisible gestures – love is an action, not a word. Instead, the mountains and the forest speak. A bee buzzes juicy, wind rustles with a woody hill, a bough creaks aggesively.

Someone probably have said Kaplanoglu’s trilogy is a melancholy epos of a society urbanizing, distancing itself from nature, and people distancing themselves from each other.

To me, Honey is a magical realistic painting with a door. You can enter if you want to. Coming inside means a cinematic romance of sounds and images, a slow dance to a folk song of forest music and emerald meadows, and the story of a father and a son, portrayed in minimalistic glory. If you choose to stay outside on the veranda though, the film is but a beautiful lullaby.

by Moa Geistrand