Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan is a rapturously beautiful film about the love that binds a farmer and his land, a husband and a wife, two old friends, and a man and a stork. But love is not the whole story. Indeed, it is nearly undone by government corruption, ecological neglect, and capitalist greed run rampant. Kotevska places her film on the side of hope, a position as precarious as a stork with an injured wing taking flight from a nest perched atop a three-story house. The stork survives, thanks to the dedicated care of Nikola, the farmer who rescued him from an even worse situation. Nikola and the stork, whom he names Silyan, save each other.
The co-director of the acclaimed documentary Honeyland (2020), Kotevska again sets her story in rural Macedonia, this time in the village of Češinovo-Obleševo, which has the largest population of white storks in Europe. The storks migrate from the south every spring and rebuild their nests as the farmers begin the season’s planting. They follow the ploughs and tractors, eating the live insects, frogs, and mice churned up from the newly thawed land, and they continue this symbiotic relationship until the end of the harvest season. When the film begins, Nikola’s farm is thriving, and he and his family are sprucing up their house. But when the farmers take their produce to market, there are no buyers willing to pay even the cost of their labor. Nikola’s family leaves to find work in Germany, and with his closest friend, Nikola takes a job driving an excavator in a landfill.
Without the farms, the storks also descend on the landfill, where they are poisoned by plastics and rotting waste. The stork with the broken wing is barely alive when Nikola takes him home and names him Silyan, after the stork in a foundational Macedonian fable about a young man who is cursed by his father for refusing to work and is turned into a stork, forced to live unrecognized in the village that was his home. Kotevska not only explores the connections between humans and the natural world, she digs into the stories that shape our lives, perhaps more than we consciously acknowledge. In her film, these stories reside in images, and as photographed by Jean Dakar, some are so glorious that they will stay in the mind’s eye forever.
The Tale of Silyan screens this evening, November 29, and throughout the week at IFC Center. Director Tamara Kotevska will be in attendance for a Q&A this evening.
