Nature has a way of revealing what people are capable of for better or worse in the films of Tamara Kotevska, who previously found both a story of personal resilience and environmental decay with the exquisite 2019 documentary “Honeyland” co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov, following a beekeeper in Macedonia made vulnerable herself by attempting to protect the native species of bees and the ecosystem they create as those far less conscientious moved in on her territory. Kotevska’s return to her homeland in “The Tale of Silyan” is especially poignant when her arrival comes as people are leaving the country in droves, unable to continue in an agriculture business that has completely fallen apart when the produce of small local farms is no longer wanted by buyers that make pacts with larger entities and the grown children of farmers are leaving for opportunities abroad when it looks like carrying on tradition will come at too great a cost, illuminating a vicious cycle that surely has reverberations the world over.
This is not necessarily a new phenomenon in Macedonia as Kotevska notes by framing her latest film with a folk tale dating back to the 17th century about the child disowned by his father after deciding to leave the nest, only to find his way into another quite literally when he’s cursed to turn into a stork, and he is imagined to be one of the many storks that fly above Češinovo, the small village where “The Tale of Silvan” is set as Nikola, another father, laments the departure of his son years earlier as the farm that’s been in his family for over 60 years looks under threat. Despite a bounty of watermelon and potatoes, Nikola, his wife Jana, their daughter Ane and her husband Ace have trouble selling any of it at regional farmers’ markets and even with other crops like tobacco, they can’t entice the bigger buyers that previously distributed their produce, a fate that has led to many farmers in the community to stage protests where they simply dump the rotten food onto the streets to raise awareness of their plight. With the breakdown of the system that once provided sustainability to families like Nikola’s, it becomes only a matter of time before the family itself starts falling apart as Ane and Ace look to resettle in Germany as their best chance at helping out as they raise their own daughter and Jana has her doubts about keeping the land, as much as she knows what it means to her husband.
As Kotevska previously pulled off so elegantly in “Honeyland,” the brutality of the situation is expressed in a series of hard cuts where the abbreviation of all the consequences makes them easier to understand for an audience and harder to accept for Nikola, who is ultimately left looking after the farm himself and has only the company of his friend Iljo, a fellow farmer who appears to have been similarly abandoned, and eventually a stork with a broken wing that he rescues while doing odd jobs to stay afloat. The torrent of misfortunate is mightily effective, though the brevity in general can leave the film feeling slightly undernourished at times as it moves between the fanciful tone of the fairy tale and the harsh reality that Nikola faces in standing his ground, with the breathtaking cinematography of storks chattering about occasionally making the moments where the film crashes back to earth seem unintentionally abrupt. Nonetheless, the film is completely disarming when Nikola’s care for the stork leads him to start seeing other parts of the world around him that he can repair on his own.
The bond between Nikola and the bird is both simple and lovely enough to connect with anyone, but “The Tale of Silyan” has the same remarkable and unforced universality about it as “Honeyland” did in a much more profound respect when it isn’t difficult to imagine farmers facing the same squeeze worlds away from Macedonia and as Ane and Ace find life in a metropolis no more comfortable, it asks what is being sacrificed for perhaps no better way forward. Although it could seem for Nikola that all his time tilling the soil has amounted to naught in the final calculus, the experience of all those years watching things grow surely have value and in envisioning what he does in the desperate situation in front of him, Kotevska holds the seeds for potential optimism far and wide.
“The Tale of Silyan” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on August 30th at 9:15 am at Astra 2 and 7:30 pm at Astra 1.