VIFF 2012 review: More Than Honey

Trust me—you never knew bees could be this amazing. With unprecedented close-up footage of the burly insects on their busy quests for mates and pollen, Markus Imhoof reveals the creatures’ complexity, intelligence, and absolute necessity to life on Earth. The camera flies from the U.S., where massive bee-factories-on-wheels travel by truck between fruit regions, to an almost apocalyptic landscape in China, where the bees are gone and legions of cheap labourers clumsily pollinate blossoms by hand. There is science here, and ample poetry, too—along with an urgent message about the disappearance of bees all over the globe.