Colony

Beautifully photographed by Ross McDonnell and skilfully edited by Carter Gunn, COLONY follows several American beekeepers during 2008 and 2009 as the country’s economy spiralled downward. Among them is David Hackenberg, who first identified colony collapse disorder when he mysteriously lost eighty million bees from his Florida hives. Many keepers blamed insecticides for killing more than one quarter of the bees in the United States, but no one had any evidence. We see the keepers search for solutions, testify before politicians and confront pesticide manufacturers.

The mystery is like something out of science fiction and has dark implications for the future. Because our agriculture depends on pollination, when bees are in trouble, so is society. The expression “busy as a bee” gains deeper meaning after hearing the quirky entrepreneur David Mendes describe his migratory pattern. Packing thousands of hives onto a tractor-trailer, he travels across the country, renting out his bees to farmers for weeks at a time, following crop cycles from Maine to Florida to California.

Gunn and McDonnell carefully compose these scenes, attaining an intimacy without being intrusive. The filmmakers are equally capable at filming on the microcosmic scale, drawing us into the world of bees so that we root for their survival as much as our own. – Toronto International Film Festival