Macedonian director Tamara Kotevska regarded the wounded white stork rescued by a farmer in her Oscar-contending film The Tale of Silyan, as a human trapped in a bird’s body. She makes no apologies for such anthropomorphism.
She argues that “humanising” animals is one way of sparking interest in them among city dwellers (and cinema-goers) who possibly have no connection with nature whatsoever.
“It’s absolutely necessary sometimes to do this because people are very ignorant, and the majority of people are never in actual communication with animals. There are societies where there are not even stray animals – where you can’t even see a cat or a dog on the street.”
However, even she had her doubts whether a stork could carry a movie. “In fact, I was convinced we cannot make a character out of a stork. They’re not very expressive animals…but when I actually saw the footage afterwards, you can see that he has a range of emotions that could be human as well: the way he likes or doesn’t like food, the way he feels hesitant or not, you can observe this and find a resemblance [to humans] and so I see nothing bad in this.”
Kotevska produced The Tale of Silyan alongside cinematographer Jean Dakar, through Ciconia Film. Only gradually did other partners come aboard, among them Anna Hashmi from The Corner Shop and Macedonian producer Jordanco Petkovski. A little later, Concordia, run by Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim and Laurene Powell Jobs, threw in their support. Kotevska says there was no creative interference from these partners. “I really appreciate that. This is exactly the film I want to make.”
The documentary works on many different levels. On the one hand, it’s the tale of the injured stork being nursed back to health by the kindly, charismatic farmer, Nikola Conev. However, Kotevska is also looking in close detail at the plight of rural Macedonian communities where drops in prices for farm goods are having a catastrophic effect. This is a story of a family too, and of why Nikola is forced to live on his own for many months while’s wife, daughter and grandchild are away in Germany.
There are obvious parallels between the storks and the humans. At certain points, both seem equally vulnerable. Kotevska had originally filmed around 10 of the farming families but eventually focused on the Conevs. She knew the daughter was planning to migrate, and realised that would add another dimension to the storytelling – what she calls “the migration metaphor between the two species.”
During editing, the director had the idea of grafting on a voice-over recounting the old myth of Silyan, a son who turned against his father, rejected life on the land, but was cursed and turned into a stork as a result.
“I didn’t have this on my mind, during the shooting. When we got all this beautiful material and were putting it together, that is when I got inspired,” she remembers. “This is a story I grew up with. My grandparents told it to me while we were observing the storks as kids. It’s a very popular tale.”
She felt that elements of this ancient folk tale, for instance how it deals with “alienation from the land and the roots,” are as topical as ever today.
“It was very difficult to put all of this together. It was a huge challenge and a huge risk,” Kotevska says of drawing so many different strands together. “It took a lot of delicate choices in editing.”
On one point, though, she refused to compromise. As the end credits make clear, the filmmakers didn’t take short cuts by using AI programmes like Sora. All that remarkable footage of the birds was shot for real, without any technological trickery.
In her work, Kotevska continually explores the relationship between humans and nature – and the constant danger of damaging the eco-system. “In all my films, this is the thematic, even if they are quite different from one another,” she notes. (Her next project, Man vs Flock, sees her move into fiction, but the story, about an elderly farmer trying to protect his land against a Chinese construction company, is on familiar ground).
In her Oscar-nominated Honeyland (2019), bees were the focus. Now it’s storks. The catalyst for The Tale of Silyan was the stories she read about these birds, which have traditionally been cherished in Macedonia, foraging for food in rubbish dumps.
“I got really intrigued to look deeper into this topic and so I went on a journey with a documentary – which I didn’t know was going to turn out to be a feature film.”
She describes storks as “maybe my favourite animals in Macedonia, the animals of my childhood.” When she’d stay as a kid with her grandparents in their village, she’d always encounter storks. That made it all the more shocking to see them caught up and dying in landfill trash.
“In areas like Macedonia, there is a lot of controversy about the trash business and importing trash from other countries,” she points out. “It’s a very delicate topic. Landfills keep growing and destroying the very beautiful nature of the region. Protected species get attracted to this landfill and start dying out.”
After Honeyland, you might have expected financiers to have been buzzing around Kotevska. That film was a huge box office hit in Macedonia, played in over 40 festivals, and it sold very widely. Nonetheless, this was the pandemic period, and when she tried to develop a fictional movie, she struggled to get it off the ground. She made another documentary, The Walk (2023), about the plight of young displaced Syrian refugee in Turkey, and then she turned to the storks on the landfill sites.
“We were facing a long period of not having funds and were self-funding it, which was quite heavy and exhausting,” she recalls of the early stages of developing Silyan.
Post-Covid, financing for documentaries in Macedonia was only really available for projects in their latter stages. “It doesn’t go as smooth as someone giving you money to go off and shoot a topic. You really need to show some really strong material to make somebody believe, and even then, it’s not certain…it’s really difficult in general for documentary filmmakers in general today. It’s not as if somebody will just fund an idea.”
One company that did ‘believe’ was National Geographic, who acquired worldwide rights for The Tale of Silyan in September, and the film will eventually appear on Disney’s streaming service. Having world-premiered at Venice 2025, the film will be released in the UK by Dogwoof on 12 December, following its North American theatrical release by Picturehouse at the end of last month.
