Like director Tamara Kotevska’s previous feature Honeyland (which she co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov), this sly, delightful film is neither a pure documentary nor a work of fiction. Instead, this blends folk tale and mud-caked vérité to tell the story of a contemporary farming family, the Conevs, in economically depressed North Macedonia.
Sixtysomething paterfamilias Nikola and his wife, Jana, have been growing watermelons, tomatoes and tobacco on the family land for years. However, the wholesale prices have recently dropped through the soil, prompting a mini riot by irate agricultural workers who take out their frustrations by destroying their own crops. Nikola and Jana’s daughter Ana decides to emigrate to Germany with her husband, taking their preschool-aged daughter with them, only to discover that most of their wages will be eaten up by childcare fees. They implore Jana to come out and be their childminder, leaving Nikola to try to sell the farmland for a pittance and find a job at a local landfill. Melancholy video-calls to the family abroad underscore his loneliness, but at least he has old mucker Ilija to talk to and share the odd bottle of hooch.
As we learn all this, the story is intercut with glowing, macro-lens-tastic shots of white storks, that elegant breed of fowl whose stately, high-stepping gait and gentle manner are lovingly captured. A voiceover tells the titular tale of Silyan, a farmer’s son who tried to abandon his family and was turned into a stork by his father’s curse, and then returned to his family in stork form. And of course, that’s re-enacted with Nikola himself, who alludes to a son (never met onscreen) who moved away years ago. When Nikola and Ilija find a stork with a broken wing at the dump, Nikola takes it in under his more symbolic wing, and even shells out for a mostly pointless visit to a vet in the city, which mainly establishes that storks don’t like dry cat food.
Kotevska depicts the growing bond between man and bird with warmth and humour, and while the musical score is a bit on the sappy side, there are enough drolly astringent touches to make this cockle-warming family viewing, if you have a family that likes stories of unhappy agrarian workers.
• The Tale of Silyan is in US cinemas now, and in UK and Irish cinemas from 12 December.
