Crowds Extend Run of “Queen of the Sun” at the Film Forum

Still from Queen of the Sun

It was a full house at the Northwest Film Forum last night, for a showing of Queen of the Sun, which made me hopeful for director Taggart Siegel.

Yesterday he’d emailed me that, “The Film Forum mentioned last night if the audience is big enough on Monday night and possibly Tuesday night they will extend it for longer.”

The Film Forum just announced the bee documentary is being held over. The original run ends March 10, but they’ve booked an extra showing on Sunday, March 13 at 5:15 p.m.

I was taken with the film’s beauty, energy, and insight when I saw it at SIFF 2010–all of which are unusual when it comes to in-depth treatments of colony collapse disorder and the future of beekeeping. I decided to see it again, to see how it held up almost a year later, and was impressed to see it’s about as prescient as one of its heroes, Rudolf Steiner. Jeff Shannon, in his Seattle Times review, explains: 

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According to prescient predictions made by Austrian scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1923, honeybee colonies are collapsing right on schedule. It’s the cumulative effect of a variety of factors including industrialized beekeeping (especially queen breeding), the mutating effects of pesticides and the absence of eco-balancing diversity caused by single-crop (monocultural) agriculture.

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(I happened to follow a pair of middle-aged Germans out of the theater, and they were deep in discussion of Steiner, who gave a series of lectures on “The Bees” in 1923, and was dubious about the long-term effects of artificial queen-breeding. You don’t want to take Steiner uncritically, but his notion that we could learn more from bee behavior than by manipulating and exploiting it is pretty solid.)

In re-watching it, I was struck by how gorgeously it is filmed, the colors of flowers supersaturated, popping off the screen in low depth-of-field shots. Ladles of honey drip gold into huge glass bowls. The dodging and zig-zagging of the camera through a field of wildflowers is pure bliss.

Yvon Achard

But it also mentions Bayer and neonicotinoids, both of whom have come under mounting scrutiny following leaked EPA documents, and other stress vectors, like varroa mites, all of which are still in the running for underlying causes of CCD (ongoing since 2006).

It’s almost staggering how much “the bees have to teach us,” to borrow the film’s subtitle. The film ranges from genetics and the structure of honeycomb, to the history of beekeeping and the pernicious effects of monocultural agriculture.

Familiar faces like those of Michael Pollan, Gunther Hauk, and Vandana Shiva pop up to put in their two cents, but it’s the heartfelt stories of strangers that have you misting up. My favorite remains Yvon Achard, the 70-year-old beekeeping yogi from Grenoble, who brushes his bees down with his handlebar moustache, and meditates alongside his hives.

Producer Jon Betz, left, with director Taggart Siegel (Photo: Lauren Johnson)

I spoke with Siegel at Plum on Monday night, to catch up on what’s happened in the intervening months. Siegel, who was still thrilled from seeing a crowd of 500 at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, said he has almost 40 cities booked across the U.S. Interest is high in California (the Bay Area, especially, to no one’s surprise), New York, Vermont, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida. 

His production company, Collective Eye, is handling the distribution–he’s still a little steamed at this previous success, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, being scheduled to open in wintry January in Chicago and Minnesota. (It is still, he said proudly, a top Netflix film in Portland.)

It’s extra work to distribute via a grassroots network–and Siegel is a little envious of mainstream advertising budgets–but the relationship audiences have with the film changes dramatically. In Portland, they got Mayor Sam Adams to proclaim a Honeybee Week (Adams keeps bees himself, so it wasn’t a tough sell), and arranged a Tour de Hives, so that viewers drunk with bee-love could go experience the fuzzy-legged creatures on their own. 360 people went on the tour in one afternoon.

Siegel said he’s been surprised by the help he’s gotten from beekeepers, who, he points out, can lead fairly solitary or isolated existences. But online, they’re like a band of pollinators, eager to arrange all sorts of events around showings of the film. Talking about how he fits into the film industry, he shrugged and smiled: “I am the roots–underground is where I work the best.” But that said, Roger Ebert has requested a screener, and Ebert’s review of Farmer John  helped raise that film’s profile substantially.

Next…well, next is more bookings and talks to audience about Queen of the Sun, but after that, Siegel is kicking around the idea of mushrooms and mushroom hunters. “Mushrooms,” he said, “have a lot to teach us.” Oh, and PS: he was only stung about twice during filming.