The myth that I have always associated with storks is that of them delivering babies via the chimneys of Europeans. I remember vividly the first time I drove through the Romanian countryside and saw a nest on every post, and I could see how easily that myth could exist. But the folklore at the heart of The Tale of Silyan is another one altogether: One of a boy too lazy to help his father farm, and is cursed to the body of a Stork, anonymous among the multitude of birds that roam eastern Europe.
When I reviewed Honeyland back in 2019, I wrote, “It was a marvel of a documentary, one that feels more like a narrative slice of Shakespearean tragedy as any kind of typical 'issue' documentary. Somehow, the entire scope of the human condition is encapsulated, wholesale, into a single, compact, but living and breathing, story. ” With The Tale of Silyan from director Tamara Kotevska, this is equally true, although she has somehow raised the bar here of seamlessly intermingling human-scale documentary storytelling with universal metafiction.
The film offers an ode to the symbiosis of the small independent farms of Macedonia, the working people, and the land which provides everything. It is perfectly captured in a lengthy scene of storks following along behind a tractor as it plows up rows of potatoes, the birds gulping down frogs unearthed in the wake of the process.
Nikola has worked family’s land for 60 years. It is how and where he met his wife, Jana, and it has provided food and sustenance for children and grandchildren. It is a harmonious life of family and cooperation until the current economic circumstances see wholesalers lowballing the price offered for their crops of potatoes, peppers, and tobacco, below the cost of fertilizer and fuel. Unable to sell at even a sliver of profit, they are left with a bountiful harvest that is going to rot them into poverty.
Nikola’s eldest son, perhaps sensing the 21st century global climate crisis, left for a life abroad years ago. He did this even as Nikola, Jana and the remaining family, their other daughter, her husband, and their granddaughter were building him a second house on the farm, making him a pariah. This major financial catastrophe now forces his remaining family to move to Germany and take jobs in fast-food service to make ends meet.
Nikola is left alone on the now unused land, working as a bulldozer driver in a garbage landfill. The metaphor is potent, as the storks follow the sound of the engines from the verdant farmland to the apocalyptic trash-wasteland. As the farming ends, so to does the plentiful food for the birds who are left to pick for scraps in the garbage.
Wasting away watching TV and attempting to cook for himself in a large empty home, Nikola rescues a stork with a broken wing and begins to nurse it back to health. A Greek (or...Macedonian) chorus of clacking beaks, as the storks bend the necks back, accompany Nikola’s struggle with family, purpose, and tradition.
His gentle nursing of the stork is a balm as he agonizes over selling the land (or burning it to the ground for insurance as some of his neighbours attempt to so) while trying to stay in touch with his family via a dodgy iPhone and poor internet connection. The Tale of Silyan is truly a mix of modernity and a clever reversal of the Silyan myth, in which Nikola creates a son to help on the farm by domesticating a wild stork.
In the painterly closing credits of the film, there is a line of text saying, “No AI was used in the making of this film.” Which is downright astonishing given the cinematography and precise visual storytelling that juxtapose the modern agrarian crisis with epic framing of storks in action. This is often done in the same shot.
They say that every film that gets finished and out to audiences is a miracle. But how this kind of filmmaking is accomplished is beyond my ken. But I am here for it. The Tale of Silyan is a miracle among miracles.