The opening minutes of “Honeyland” are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. A woman makes her way on foot across wild meadowlands and up a mountainside, carefully stepping along a narrow ledge to a rocky outcropping, where bees have made a hive. Without much protective gear, and apparently without being stung, she extracts several honeycombs and secures them in a sack.

Back home, in the valley — she is one of two permanent residents of a hamlet in what is now called the Republic of North Macedonia — she transplants the colony to a stone wall near her house. In the coming months, she sings to the bees and talks to them, explaining the terms of their relationship. When the time comes to take the honey, she’ll leave half of it for them. It’s not a bargain, exactly, since the bees have no real say in the matter, but it is a sustainable arrangement, and one that has survived in this region for generations.

The woman, Hatidze Muratova , is an actual beekeeper, and “Honeyland,” directed by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, is a documentary about her life and labors. Originally commissioned to make a video about conservation efforts in Macedonia, the filmmakers spent three years with Hatidze; her mother, Nazife; and the late-arriving people next door. ( More about them shortly ). As a result, Stefanov and Kotevska have done more than record the rhythms and textures of rural life. They have shaped their observations — more than 400 hours of footage — into a luminous neorealist fable, a sad and stirring tale of struggle, persistence and change.