Macedonia’s largest white stork population resides in Češinovo, a small farming village. As dependent on the success of the country’s agriculture as the humans which cultivate the land, the birds have made a comfortable home for themselves here, in the rich abundance of the earth. In The Tale of Silyan, Tamara Kotevska reappropriates a Macedonian fable about a father and his estranged son for a rich allegory about the contemporary battle of farmers against unchecked capitalism and global warming, and the concurrent need for a new kind of symbiosis between humankind and nature.

Kotevska, whose 2020 documentary Honeyland became the first film to ever be nominated for both Best Documentary and Best International Film at the Oscars, once more returns to the perennial conflict between environmental demands and moneyed greed. Her main subject here is Nikola, a sixty-year-old, sunny-faced farmer who has worked the land for forty-five years. Nikola works alongside his beloved wife, Jana, growing potatoes, tobacco, watermelon, peppers, cabbage and tomatoes, but their abundant success is mostly for naught when confronted with the outright exploitation of buyers and sellers on the open market. Despite record-breaking yields, the farmers cannot make enough money.

The Tale of Silyan Slyly Tells Multiple Allegories In One

In the fable of Silyan, a young boy refuses the responsibility to provide food for the village. His father, incensed at the rebuke of the family trade, curses him so that he may turn into a stork and thereby avoid having to look him in the face. The sky opens up, and, struck by lightning, the boy irrevocably transforms. Desperate to be taken in by his family but unable to speak, Silyan instead clacks his long orange beak and covertly helps his bereaved father maintain the farmland. In Kotevska’s film, Nikola has also lost a son to the appeal of urban living, but his real battle is in trying to adapt to a new world where his trade has become largely obsolete.

The film is at its most lucid when Kotevska’s images are allowed to speak for themselves, as when Nikola and his neighbor desperately use a metal detector around the land in the hopes of finding gold, in the same way one might look for food in a fridge that you already know is empty.

Nikola’s family moves away to greener financial pastures in Germany; his neighbors organize protests against the lack of governmental protection. Caught somewhere between wanting to care for his family and his natural inclination to operate as a steward of the land, Nikola holds off as long as he can before being, inevitably, forced to put his land up for sale. As a melodic voiceover tells us, Nikola bemoans his family’s abandonment while missing what’s right in front of him — his son, reborn as a stork. In a softly didactic and poetic manner, Kotevska illustrates how humans operate in the same way as animals, yet in total obliviousness of their concomitant existence. Nikola and family point out for themselves just how human-like the storks are: building their homes from scratch, sharing food, protecting kin from the perils of harsher weather. Yet, it isn’t until a broken-winged stork shows up on Nikola’s doorstep that he really, truly, starts to see the animal as his neighbor.

Considering the film’s source material and Kotevska’s predisposed inclination towards the esoteric, The Tale of Silyan can sometimes feel pulled between its fiction aesthetic and its documentary canvas. The neither here-nor-there approach does threaten to derail this almost Biblical-like allegory from finding its footing. The film is at its most lucid when Kotevska’s images are allowed to speak for themselves, as when Nikola and his neighbor desperately use a metal detector around the land in the hopes of finding gold, in the same way one might look for food in a fridge that you already know is empty. During a protest, the farmers toss their unsold food — three tons of potatoes for Nikola’s family — onto the road, literally blocking the land with the fruits of their labor.

In one of the more devastating succession of images, Nikola resorts to driving an excavator at a landfill site, where he witnesses how the storks are also forced to mine for sustenance amongst the waste. Meanwhile, Nikola’s neighbors burn their crops and trees because the insurance payout is far more lucrative than what they can earn by tilling. Though Kotevska’s film ends with unabashed optimism both for the farmer and his relationship to his estranged son, a pallor of unmistakable pessimism pervades. If our world is to survive the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots as well as the drastic changes to the land brought on by mass pollution, perhaps we ought to be fighting multiple battles at once. Like Silyan, we must accept our new status. Like Nikola, we must be resilient. Like storks, we continue to rely on each other for warmth.