‘The Tale Of Silyan’ Review – Celebrating The Ones Left Behind

Honeyland is the kind of unforgettable documentary that never leaves the memory. Watching it was one of my favorite modern film-viewing experiences because it allows audience members to immerse themselves in its world, which doesn’t often happen in this genre of filmmaking and takes a very adept filmmaker to convey.

Tamara Kotevska blends her familiar world of myths and folktales with modern stories from working-class and farming communities in her third documentary, The Tale of Silyan. Along with cinematographer Jean Dakar, she tells the story of a farmer and the white stork he rescues, who ultimately saves him. The documentary opens with a perfect close-up: Silyan, our avian hero, with eyes like black pearls, and Nikola gently caressing his long white neck with tenderness and intimacy. It’s love at first sight, and one of the most beautiful shots I have seen in a documentary recently. 

The story unfolds. Dakar and Kotevska use all the elements of storytelling to make their film vibrant with liveliness. Sound design, lighting, and powerful camera work give their simple fable an otherworldly aesthetic. While the real story and the fable intersect and diverge at times, Kotevska maintains the consistency of her filmmaking tools. Her narrative structure is condensed and elaborate, with the contrast between the grim realities of the farmers who are losing their land and their family businesses, and the bond that forms between Silyan and Nikola.

Nikola and Silyan don’t meet until 40 minutes into the film, but when it happens, it’s all worth the wait. It becomes a union of two friends who have only recently become aware of the bond they had. None of them wants to leave the land or each other, and the fairytale blossoms in full throttle, heightening our sensations beyond a traditional animal rescue story into a tale where we root for both antiheroes: a stork and an old man, both left behind, abandoned by their migrating families, content among the ruins. 

Kotevska perfectly captures each moment and the smallest details. A stork’s eye. A farmer’s roughened hand. Baby storks hatching from eggs under their mother’s fluffy wings. But it’s not just the visual motifs. Kotevska evokes the feeling of immigration in humans with the migration of birds. It symbolizes the immigrant’s feelings in the form of her chosen stork, Silyan, and through its alienation and movement from one land to the other. She highlights the immigrant’s uprooted state of existence, as well as the migrant bird’s estrangement from a solid sense of homeland. She creates the decay of the land through the lens of the stork’s feeding habits, both a scary and heartbreaking analysis of what the state of our farming communities and landscapes has degraded to. Her command of her narrative tools and structure is excellent and paves the road for a brilliant future documentarian.

But it’s not all fairytales and butterflies; this picture highlights the struggle of the last generation of farmers in a rapidly industrialized world. Farming families face the disappointment of the inability to sell their crops. It’s a scary world; people no longer seek the right places to buy their food and supplies. It’s all big chain supermarkets and labeled crops while farmers bend their backs and sweat their hard work into nothing.

Kotevska shows a country in decay, acres and acres of land going barren. Hardworking men forced to search for jobs at an age when all they could dream of is coziness and rest with their extended families. Young couples struggling and traveling off to foreign countries to start from scratch. Families separated and hearts broken. Nikola is the face of the dying land, the decaying country, and the loneliness of a man at a fragile stage in his life. 

The Tale of Silyan is a tale of two lonely souls who found each other in the quiet corners of a broken world. It just happens that one of them has wings, and the other a soul. This is an award-worthy vehicle, one that deserves more hype.

The Tale of Silyan is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of National Geographic. The film is North Macedonia’s official selection for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards.