TIFF 50: The cranes are flying in "The Tale of Silyan"

by Cláudio Alves

According to Macedonian legend, there was once a boy called Silyan who wished to go far away, leave his village behind, and spread his wings into the world beyond. But when he told his father, the patriarch flew into a rage, cursing the name of the child and his dreams along with it. Answering these paternal furies, the heavens opened above, releasing a mighty force that struck the boy. He didn't die, though. Instead, as the father had decreed, Sylian turned into a stork who could now do as he wanted and leave everything that he knew. But this freedom was not to be an idyll. It was a cursed existence, lonely and unmoored, caught in the space between worlds and belonging to nowhere. 

Tamara Kotevska uses this folktale as the jumping start from which her latest exercise soars into the cinematic heavens above. The Tale of Silyan, which was just announced as North Macedonia’s submission for the 98^th Academy Awards, marks the director's second feature since she, along with Ljubomir Stefanov, helmed the Oscar-nominated Honeyland...

Perhaps Silyan is among the storks Kotevska observes on roofs and trees, and slashing through the sky in elegant flight. Sometimes lightning draws a jagged line across the stormy backdrop, illuminating the creature's slender silhouette. On other occasions, dawn's warm kiss paints them gold against watermelon fields below. Such images are enough to intoxicate the aesthete, their beauty so ravishing it threatens to turn the whole project toward a lyrical wildlife doc. It isn't to be so. Amid those splendorous observations with which DP Jean Dakar blesses the screen, another subject of interest arises.

Not an avian protagonist, but a farmer in North Macedonia. His name is Nicola and, just like Silyan's father, he finds himself separated from his child. The prodigal son has left and only reaches his parents through occasional video calls. It's the fate of many a family from such rural areas, where the older generations persist in a way of life that's becoming harsher and harsher every day, while the youth escape in search of better opportunities. The economic systems in place aren't built for the family farm, privileging the profit of big corporations and industrialized agriculture.

For some, to stay is to become an anachronism. Nevertheless, a few remain and choose to fight. Those younger farmers who stay go to bat beside their aged peers, demanding workers' rights and the dignity they're owed as citizens, laborers, human beings. Chants of "farmers are not slaves" erupt across protests during harvest season, but nobody in power seems to listen or care. It's gotten so bad that Nicola has started pondering if this state of things is sustainable, or if this precariousness will be the end of him. Perchance it's time for change. Only, like a social worker tells him, he's in a difficult position.

In his early 60s after 45 years of hard work, the farmer is both too young to retire and too old to start a new profession. His only resource is to wait until he can finally rest his aching bones, continue to toll away his body and soul until those pesky documents bear the right age for retirement. The Tale of Silyan is about that wait and what flourishes within. Namely, a peculiar inter-species bond that comes to be when Nicola finds a white stork with a broken wing. Needing salvation, a place to rest, and the kindness of strangers willing to nurse it back to health, the bird becomes the focus of the farmer's days.

Moreover, the noble beast embodies a reminder of one's connection to this vast landscape and what it provides, nature as a concept and a material reality in which we all live, whether we realize it or not. This is true for Nicola as an individual and for Kotevska's film as a whole. Through the stork, she invokes the Macedonian folklore as symbolic parallel to the farmers' plight, a reflection of the man's growing loneliness, a deepening connection between the camera and the land in its many meanings. Because land is not just the ground beneath our feet, but the people that live in it, the tales they tell, the lives lived, lost, forgotten, and those still to come.

In this, the director risks sentimentality and the effects of such a strong pull toward the poetic on what, for all intents and purposes, comprises a piece of political filmmaking. Truth be told, it was a risk worth taking as Kotevska is up for the challenge and strikes the right balance between these elements that, though connected, can still feel rather disparate. Cinematography and sound design prove especially agile at bridging The Tale of Silyan's thematic dimensions, while the music, unfortunately, errs on the side of schmaltz. The other minor fragility has to be the length, which, at 81 minutes, seems too short and sketch-like for a cinematic register that benefits from quiet contemplation and a structure willing to linger rather than fly away with the storks.

At TIFF, The Tale of Silyan will have another screening tomorrow, September 11. It is part of the festival's documentary program.