The Pollinators of Slovenia

An interactive documentary by Studio Airport for Emergence Magazine.

One out of every three bites of food we eat exists because of pollinators. That single fact hums at the center of The Pollinators of Slovenia, a five-episode interactive documentary produced by Studio Airport in collaboration with Emergence Magazine. Released in 2023 and directed by Bram Broerse, the project travels deep into a small, forest-dense country in Central Europe to ask a question that feels increasingly urgent: how do we sustain the ancient relationships between humans, land, and the creatures that make life possible?

Slovenia is an unusual place to begin such a story, and yet it is perhaps the only place where the story could unfold with this kind of quiet confidence. With more than half its territory covered by forest, its landscape remains largely untouched by the industrial agriculture that has depleted pollinator populations across much of Europe. The Carniolan honeybee, native to these forests and meadows, is so deeply embedded in Slovenian culture that it appears in the art, poetry, and painted wooden panels that have adorned beehives here for centuries. A national beekeeping magazine has been in continuous publication for over 120 years. Techniques developed by Slovenian beekeepers, including the design of movable hive frames, are now used by practitioners around the world.

Studio Airport, the Amsterdam-based interdisciplinary design studio known for its long-standing creative partnership with Emergence Magazine, approached the project as both a visual essay and an act of ecological witness. Director Bram Broerse and art director Maurits Wouters, working alongside cinematographers Luuk de Kok and Mischa van Schajik, built a form for the work that mirrors its subject: an interactive experience that unfolds gradually, requiring presence and patience from the viewer, much like the act of tending to bees itself.

The documentary's five episodes move through the Slovenian landscape by way of the people who have made their lives inseparable from it. In the forest episode, we meet Roman Košale, a forager and beekeeper who keeps three stationary apiaries deep in a woodland area he describes as pristine, a place with no industry and no intensive agriculture. Roman came to beekeeping through illness: as a child he suffered from severe asthma, and it was the air inside a traditional Slovenian apiary, the slovenski čebelnjak, that healed him. He now spends nights sleeping inside his beehive alongside his wife, breathing in the aerosols produced by the vibration of thousands of bees. His honey, infused with fresh wild thyme and chestnut, carries the specific mineral signature of the soil beneath the trees where his colonies live.

Roman's story encapsulates something larger that the documentary is after. The relationship between humans and pollinators in Slovenia is not a relic or a romantic ideal. It is a living, daily practice, passed down through generations and now being adapted in response to a shifting climate. Scientists, urban beekeepers, family farmers, and foragers all appear across the episodes, each carrying a piece of the same understanding: that the health of bees and the health of people are not separate conditions but expressions of the same ecological truth.

The documentary also opens outward into the city. One episode follows a rooftop beekeeper navigating the hum of Ljubljana, where an urban beekeeping movement has taken hold. Another tracks the farm-to-table journey of food whose very existence depends on the quiet labor of pollinators. Across all five episodes, the camera and the interactive interface work together to place the viewer not as an observer of nature but as a participant in it, moving through fields and forest floors, pausing at hive entrances, following the logic of a landscape that still knows how to take care of itself.

The formal choices Studio Airport made for this project are inseparable from its meaning. The interactive structure, built with developer studio September Digital, allows viewers to move through each episode at their own pace, accompanied by original music and sound design by Julian Tjon Sack Kie and narration written by Rachel Broomhead and voiced by Tisa N. Herlec. The experience is immersive in the way that an afternoon in a garden is immersive: not overwhelming, but absorbing.

Studio Airport has produced six volumes of the print edition of Emergence Magazine, each one a physical artifact that the studio treats as a design problem inseparable from the ecological and philosophical concerns of the content. The Pollinators of Slovenia extends that sensibility into a digital, cinematic form. Where the printed volumes work with the weight and texture of paper to slow the reader down, the interactive documentary uses the rhythms of video and landscape sound to achieve a similar stillness.

The project arrives at a moment when the urgency around pollinator decline is well understood but the pathways toward change remain contested. Slovenia, the documentary suggests, offers something more useful than an argument: a model. Because the country is small, with diverse microclimates and a population historically oriented toward ecological stewardship, it has been proposed by some of those who appear in the film as a potential benchmark for what fully ecological farming might look like at a national scale. That claim is modest and specific, rooted in the knowledge of people who work the land rather than in policy abstraction.

What Studio Airport and Emergence Magazine have made together is a document of what survives when care is continuous, when the relationship between a person and a landscape is measured not in seasons but in generations. The bees of Slovenia have been on this planet for twenty million years. The question the documentary leaves with its viewers is not whether we can save them, but whether we can remember, in time, that we have never been separate from them.