The Tale of Silyan review – A farmer adopts a stork in a cheerful, mud-covered folk tale | film

toLike director Tamara Kotevska’s previous feature, Honeyland (which she co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov), this delightfully sly film is neither pure documentary nor a work of fiction. Instead, it blends folk tale and mud-covered reality to tell the story of a contemporary farming family, the Konevs, in economically depressed North Macedonia.

Nicola, the head of the 60-year-old family, and his wife Jana, have been growing watermelon, tomatoes and tobacco on the family land for years. However, wholesale prices have fallen recently, sparking small riots by angry agricultural workers who take out their frustrations by destroying their crops. Nicola and Jana’s daughter Anna decided to emigrate to Germany with her husband, with their pre-school daughter, only to discover that most of their wages would be eaten up by childcare fees. They plead with Jana to come out and be their child’s carer, leaving Nicola to try to sell the farmland for a pittance and find a job at the local dump. Sad video calls with family outside emphasize his loneliness, but at least he has old man Elijah to talk to and share the strange bottle of wine.

As we learn all this, the story is intercut with glowing, awe-inspiring shots of white storks, that elegant breed of bird whose stately, soaring gait and gentle manner have been lovingly captured. The audio commentary tells the titular story of Cillian, a farmer’s son who tried to abandon his family and was transformed into a stork due to his father’s curse, then returned to his family in the form of a stork. And of course, this is reenacted with Nicola himself, who alludes to a son (never met on screen) who moved away years ago. When Nicola and Ilya find a stork with a broken wing in a garbage dump, Nicola takes him under his more symbolic wing and even takes him out on a mostly meaningless visit to the town vet, which basically proves that storks don’t like dry cat food.

Kotevska depicts the growing relationship between man and bird with warmth and humour, and while the musical score is a bit on the happy side, there are enough delightfully astringent touches to make this a heartwarming family watch, if you have a family that likes stories of unhappy farm workers.