Einstein supposedly said: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live." Over the last decade, millions of bees have disappeared worldwide. Is this a one-time anomaly or are we facing total system collapse? Looking for answers, director Markus Imhoof—using exquisite cinematography to put the viewer inside the bees’ world—travels from the Alps to the Arizona desert, interviewing experts ranging from beekeepers to scientists. What separates this work from earlier films on the subject is that Imhoof proposes a possible solution…

"My intention was to allow spectators to understand the drama that is at play thanks to highly sensory images and, beyond the very real stories of the ’minuscule’ bees, to highlight a much vaster context: the pressure caused by the continually growing pyramid of the global economy, at the base of which we can find—we ought not to forget—the insects. This is the main reason why I decided take great care to make the bees visible and have the spectators get to know them better… There is a moment, in the struggle opposing the bees to the neo-liberal market economy, when a bee broker pushes beekeepers, and the latter push their bees, to further increase their performance. Bees have become chain workers, a machine expected to function upon the simple push of a button. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I could almost say that the film is a bit like Chaplin’s Modern Times, as told by the bees."—Markus Imhoof