Colony

The Joyrider series by Irish photographer Ross McDonnell reads like a short story, so raw and explicit are the images. So when I came across a trailer for a film he and Carter Gunn directed back in 2009, I knew I’d like it before I even watched it. Colony is about real beekeepers and bees, but there is a serious darkness to it that is more drama than documentary. An inexplicable phenomena left the Seppi family (the focus of the film) in a crisis – one day they had 80 million bees, the next day they were gone. The film follows their pursuit for answers including a proclamation of the rapture. It is both vast in its seriousness and beautiful in its minute capturing of detail.