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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 Kaplanoğlu 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 constituen
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