HONEYDEW

Italy | 2024 | 89 min | col.

Honeydew lies among the hills of California. It is one of the last places to retain traces of the post-hippie dream that so many pursued from the seventies onwards, people who separated themselves from a society with which they did not identify and gathered in this area in the middle of the woods to experiment with a different way of being in the world. Many of those began to grow marijuana for self-consumption as well as to contribute to their precarious living. With time, the niche enterprise has turned into the main economic source of the region. Legalization has promised wealth and drawn speculation, but has also become a bureaucratic nightmare for smaller producers. Honeydew is a collective story of a community in a crisis, split between the temptations and threats of precisely the world from which they had tried to escape on one hand and the preservation of their own lifestyle out of the box on the other hand. A sensitive, participated portrayal that discloses the dreams and fears of this small enclave under siege. (m.m.)