A beautifully mounted documentary-fable, The Tale of Silyan – the latest film from Oscar-nominated Macedonian filmmaker Tamara Kotevska (Honeyland) – is an astute blend of environmental messaging and magical realism, all tightly structured and crafted to offer up an easy to watch (and economical) film that at times feels more like a genial folk tale than a movie with a hard-hitting eco message.
Inspired by a Macedonian myth about a young farm boy who is turned into a stork by his father, The Tale of Silyan follows Nikola, a struggling Macedonian farmer, whose life becomes intertwined with that of an injured stork. The bird becomes Nikola’s best friend and, to an extent, his raison d’être, after his family heads off to Germany in search of better opportunities.
In a similar fashion to Kotevska’s multi award-winning Honeyland, the narrative structure of the film is concise and gently sentimental, all driven by beautiful cinematography by Jean Dakar (also producer) and a deftly atmospheric score from Joe Wilson Davies and Hun Oukpark. The narrative arc is very much from the world of drama fiction, and while Nikola is the only character to be fully explored, the ‘support cast’ all offer memorable moments that help drive the story.
The 17th century story of Silyan the stork flies over the entire film (even through to a charming animated section over the closing credits), and is the driver for the story. The Macedonian folk tale concerns a young boy who is born into a rural farming family. He desperately wants to escape the strenuous work on his family’s farmland, but his father is displeased with the boy’s rebellion. So the father casts a spell on Silyan, turning him into a stork, forever condemned to migrate between continents, never able to settle or have land of his own.
The contemporary story of farmer Nikola opens with footage of storks in the village of Češinovo, the location of the largest white stork population in North Macedonia. Here, he and his wife Jana tend their land and have fun in the sun gathering potatoes and watermelon, staring at the birds. They receive help from their daughter Ana and her husband, who gather crops to sell in the local market. They are a family wedded to their work, their land and their home, but when prices start to drop for their crops they join local farmers in protests.
But when Ana and her husband take the tough decision to leave with their young daughter Ilina for Germany and the prospect of better paid work, it is clearly mortifying for Nikola and Jana. Things get worse when Jana is also asked to head to Germany to provide childcare, and Nikola is left at the end of the phone, wistfully talking with his family as Jana instructs him how to cook via Facetime.
He puts up handmade signs trying to sell his land (no luck) and eventually takes a job driving tractors at a local landfill, and it is here he finds a stork with a damaged wing.
The next section of the film balances warmth and whimsy as he tends to the bird, often with the off-kilter support of his eccentric pal Ilija as they recover an old stork nest for the bird, laugh and even revert a little to boyhood state. There is even a happy ending of sorts as the bird recovers and Jana returns…but no real sense of how life on the land for the former has got better in terms of the future.
Tamara – whose co-directed feature debut Honeyland went on to win three awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival (Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary, Impact Award, Cinematography Award), and two Academy Award nominations in 2020 for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature – has a sure sense of the fairy tale structure, and there is a real feeling of warmth and compassion for the hard-working locals, their pastoral history and for the land itself.
The core premise is that Nikola saving the injured bird helps them both learn and understand each other, finding both affection and a sense of belonging that both seek in the absence of their kin. Ultimately, Silyan has such an effect on Nikola that he decides to quit his landfill job and return to his farmland to slowly bring the flock of storks back to the fertile soil.
In terms of pure documentary, it is somewhat of a leap of faith, but within Kotevska’s unique construction the whole thing works rather wonderfully.
North Macedonia/US/UK, 2025, 81mins
Dir: Tamara Kotevska
Production: Ciconia Film, Concordia Studio, The Corner Shop
International sales: Dogwoof
Producers: Tamara Kotevska, Jean Dakar, Anna Hashmi, Jordanco Petkovski
Cinematography: Jean Dakar
Editor: Martin Ivanov
Music: Joe Wilson Davies, Hun Oukpark
With: Nikola Conev, Jana Coneva, Aleksandra ‘Ana’ Coneva, Aleksandar Conev, Ilina Coneva, Ilija Stojkovski, Stojco Filipov
