By Valerie Milano & Jim Gilles
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/30/25 – Tamara Kotevska returns with a quietly poetic and deeply resonant work in The Tale of Silyan, a lyrical hybrid of myth, documentary, and social observation that explores the fragile intersection between humanity, nature, and a vanishing rural way of life. The 81-minute feature, screening at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, continues the filmmaker’s thoughtful examination of communities living at the edge of survival.
Best known for her Oscar-nominated documentary Honeyland, Kotevska once again turns her camera toward rural North Macedonia, where small family farms struggle under economic pressure and generational change. This time, however, she frames her narrative through the lens of folklore, drawing inspiration from the Macedonian myth of Silyan, a boy transformed into a stork after defying his father. The result is a film that floats gracefully between fairy tale and contemporary reality.
Set in the village of Češinovo, the film centers on Nikola Conev, a 60-year-old farmer whose vitality and warmth belie the uncertainty surrounding his future. Nikola and his wife Jana work the land together with an easy intimacy; flirting, laughing, and laboring side by side, yet the idyll is increasingly unsustainable. Their daughter Ana ultimately leaves for Germany in search of opportunity, taking her own family with her. When Jana follows to help care for her grandchild, Nikola is left behind, confronting solitude as well as the collapse of his livelihood.
Forced to sell his land, Nikola trades farming for work at a landfill, operating heavy machinery amid waste rather than crops. It is here that the film delivers one of its most poignant visual metaphors. White storks, long a familiar presence in the region, no longer trail tractors through fields. Instead, they forage at the dump. When Nikola discovers an injured stork with a broken wing, he brings the bird home, forging a gentle, wordless companionship that mirrors his own displacement.
Kotevska weaves together four distinct strands: ancient folklore, observational nature documentary, a contemporary economic portrait, and an intimate human-animal bond. The balance is delicate yet assured. The stork sequences, in particular, are breathtaking, cinematography so immersive it recalls the grandeur of classic wildlife films. Overhead, storks perch in massive nests atop telephone poles, their clattering beaks echoing through the village like a reminder of continuity even as traditions fade.
The Tale of Silyan never resorts to overt commentary, yet its political and emotional undercurrents are unmistakable. It reflects on migration, environmental erosion, and the quiet dignity of those left behind when progress moves on. The film previously screened at AFI FEST and has since been acquired for distribution by National Geographic. It also stands as North Macedonia’s submission for consideration for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards.
Tender, visually arresting, and deeply humane, The Tale of Silyan is less about loss than about adaptation, how people, like birds, learn to survive in unfamiliar landscapes. It is a film that lingers quietly, its meaning unfolding long after the final frame.
