Ellen Page Calls Attention to Bee Colony Devastation

The Vanishing of the Bees, a documentary about the mysterious collapse of honeybee colonies across the globe, received its Los Angeles premiere on Sunday night, with actress Ellen Page as the host.

"These beautiful little beings supply us with one-third of our food, and they are quickly vanishing," said Page in introducing the film.

The 87-minute doc, directed by George Langworthy and Maryam Henein and narrated by Page, follows the story of both commercial beekeepers -- some of whom keep thousands of hives and transport their bees around the country to pollinate crops -- and organic beekeepers. Many of them believe that a systemic pesticide, banned in some European countries, is behind the loss of honeybees and that the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to properly study the chemical.

"This is a bee holocaust out there," says beekeeper Dave Mendes in the film. The phenomenon, which has seen the disappearance of an untold number of bees crucial to the production of fruits and vegetables, is called Colony Collapse Disorder. So far, no definitive cause has been discovered.

Page -- who'll next act in Woody Allen's Bop Decameron-- met the directors through a mutual actor friend. "We were on the set one day and bonded because someone had killed a bee and I was like, 'Dude!'" recalled Page. "And George and Maryam and I connected in the way these things happen and it worked out really well."

The message of the film, she says, "is clearly there are imbalances we've created with our modern industrialized agriculture system and how we're hurting the life that gives us life and have lost that sense of connectedness. Hopefully, despite it being frightening, and it should be frightening, there's an opportunity here to regain that sense of connectedness."

The movie will be released on DVD (including on Amazon) and VOD (iTunes and other outlets via digital distributor FilmBuff) on June 7.