Tamara Kotevska‘s new documentary transforms rural abandonment into a meditation on companionship, myth, and the quiet survival of both farmer and stork.
There is a particular quality of light in late afternoon—golden, hesitant, already mourning its own disappearance. The newly released trailer for The Tale of Silyan opens with precisely this illumination, casting its glow across the weathered features of Nikola, a Macedonian farmer whose hands know the weight of soil better than the language of departure. National Geographic Documentary Films unveiled the footage on October 30th, offering a first glimpse into what may be the year’s most visually arresting documentary—a film that premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in August and now stands as North Macedonia’s official submission for the 98th Academy Awards.
Director Tamara Kotevska, whose 2019 documentary Honeyland earned dual Oscar nominations for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film, returns with a work that feels less like observation and more like incantation. Where Honeyland followed the solitary beekeeper Hatidže Muratova through three years of meticulous filming, The Tale of Silyan traces another kind of isolation—that of a man left behind when migration becomes the only viable future.
The Architecture of Absence
Set in Češinovo, a village in rural North Macedonia where white storks outnumber the remaining farmers, the documentary follows Nikola as government policies render his land unsellable, his crops unwanted. His children depart for Germany in search of sustainable work; his wife Jana follows to care for them while they labor in a foreign country. What remains is a man, a landfill where fertile farmland once flourished, and a wounded white stork he names Silyan—after the Macedonian folktale of a boy transformed into a bird following a quarrel with his father.
The parallel Kotevska draws is neither subtle nor sentimental. It simply is—the way myth often crystallizes into truth when you stop insisting on their separation. Nikola tends the injured bird with the same patience he once gave to soil that no longer yields profit. The stork, immobilized by injury, cannot follow the ancient migratory routes encoded in its instincts. Both are caught between departure and staying, between the life that was and the one that economic forces have rendered impossible.
Cinematographer Jean Dakar captures this liminality through images that feel painted rather than filmed—storks perched atop telephone poles like sentinels of a vanishing pastoral, their nests enormous and precarious against a sky that seems to stretch toward some unreachable horizon. The visual language recalls the poetic realism of Jean Vigo, but with a contemporary urgency rooted in ecological collapse and the death of family farming as a sustainable practice.
The Texture of Survival
What distinguishes Kotevska’s approach is her refusal to moralize. She has stated that her life as a filmmaker revolves around two obsessions: migration and nature conservation. The Tale of Silyan marries these concerns not through exposition but through the simple act of watching—observing how modern economic forces transform fertile farmland into landfills, how white storks lose their natural food supply and turn instead to trash, mirroring humanity’s own descent into convenient degradation.
The documentary spans 80 minutes, a runtime that suggests compression rather than expansion. Kotevska and editor Martin Ivanov have distilled what must have been hundreds of hours of footage into something that breathes like folklore—episodic, elliptical, trusting silence to carry as much meaning as dialogue. The score by Joe Wilson Davies and Hun OukPark threads through the images without overwhelming them, creating what one early review described as “hands-down the year’s most beautiful documentary”.
It is worth noting what Kotevska learned from Honeyland—a film that took three years to shoot and captured 400 hours of material before finding its final form. That earlier documentary taught her how to wait, how to let narrative emerge from daily ritual rather than imposing structure from above. She employs the same observational patience here, though The Tale of Silyan incorporates a more overt mythological framework, using the ancient folktale as both lens and echo chamber for contemporary displacement.
The white stork holds profound symbolic weight in Macedonian culture, a creature embedded in the mythology Kotevska absorbed as a child. Yet the film never reduces these majestic birds to metaphor. They remain stubbornly themselves—clacking beaks providing a percussive soundtrack, enormous wings folding with a grace that feels almost architectural. When Nikola whispers to the injured Silyan, “You poor bird. From today on, we will live together,” the words carry no trace of anthropomorphic projection. This is simply recognition—one stranded being acknowledging another.
The Economics of Vanishing
Kotevska has been explicit about the warning embedded in her film. As agricultural communities abandon their lands to seek urban employment, the landscape itself transforms. What was once fertile ground becomes a repository for waste, and the storks—those mythical creatures of Macedonian lore—find themselves scavenging from landfills rather than hunting in fields. The parallel to humanity’s own compromises is devastating in its clarity.
The documentary arrives at a moment when such stories feel both urgent and elegiac. The Toronto International Film Festival screened it in September; it featured on DOC NYC’s 2025 Shortlist highlighting fifteen of the year’s most significant documentaries; the SCAD Savannah Film Festival included it in their “Docs to Watch” panel. At Venice, it won Best Film in the Cinema and Arts Award competition. These accolades suggest a film that resonates beyond its specific cultural context, speaking to broader anxieties about sustainability, migration, and the slow erasure of traditional ways of living.
Kotevska’s previous work established her as a filmmaker who understands how to locate the universal within the intensely particular. Honeyland‘s Hatidže Muratova became a figure of almost mythic dimensions—the last keeper of wild bees in Europe, chanting “half for me, half for you” as she collected honey, embodying a philosophy of balance that her neighbors’ greed eventually destroyed. In The Tale of Silyan, that same sensitivity to equilibrium—or its collapse—manifests through the relationship between Nikola and the injured bird, two figures left behind by forces too large for individual resistance.
What Remains
The trailer closes with an image that lingers: Nikola and the stork in shared stillness, two silhouettes against failing light. It is an image that refuses resolution, offering neither triumph nor despair. Instead, it presents what Kotevska does best—the documentation of endurance without sentimentality, the acknowledgment that survival often looks like nothing more than continuing to exist in a landscape that no longer has use for you.
National Geographic Documentary Films will release The Tale of Silyan in select U.S. theaters beginning November 28, 2025, with a subsequent debut on Disney+ following the festival circuit. The film arrives carrying the weight of North Macedonia’s hopes for Oscar recognition, but its power transcends awards consideration. This is cinema that operates in the register of witness—not to spectacular events, but to the quiet catastrophes that unfold when economic systems render certain lives, certain landscapes, certain ways of being obsolete.
Kotevska has created a documentary that feels lifted from time, even as it addresses the most contemporary of crises. The white storks continue their ancient migrations, but now they feed from landfills. The farmers continue their ancestral practices, but their children scatter across borders in search of wages. And somewhere in the gap between myth and modernity, between the boy transformed into a stork and the man left behind with an injured bird, The Tale of Silyan finds its heartbreaking, luminous truth.
There is beauty here, but it is the beauty of preservation—not celebration. The kind that insists on looking clearly at what we are losing, even as we document its disappearance.
Why This Film Demands Your Attention
The Folklore Framework
Kotevska weaves the ancient Macedonian tale of Silyan—a boy cursed to become a stork—through Nikola’s contemporary story, creating a double exposure where myth and reality illuminate each other without collapsing into allegory.
Cinematography as Witness
Jean Dakar’s camera captures the white storks with a reverence that never softens the economic devastation surrounding them—each image balances aesthetic beauty with unflinching documentation of ecological collapse.
Migration as Metaphor and Reality
The film examines both human and animal migration, refusing to separate the two—when families leave for Germany and storks lose their feeding grounds, these are not parallel stories but interconnected consequences of the same systemic failure.
The Kotevska Method
Following Honeyland‘s observational mastery, the director demonstrates her continued evolution in capturing how individual lives become parables without losing their specificity—every frame feels both documentary and dreamlike.
Sound as Presence
The clacking beaks of nesting storks provide a percussive soundtrack that grounds the film’s mythical elements in tactile reality, reminding us that these birds are material beings, not mere symbols.
FAQ
Why does Tamara Kotevska focus on storks specifically?
In North Macedonia, white storks carry deep mythological significance, embedded in folklore Kotevska absorbed throughout childhood. By centering these birds, she explores how ancient symbols navigate contemporary ecological crisis—the storks become both themselves and reflections of human displacement.
How does this compare to Honeyland?
Both films share Kotevska’s patient observational style and concern with sustainability, but The Tale of Silyan incorporates a more explicit mythological structure while maintaining the same commitment to letting narrative emerge from daily ritual rather than imposed storytelling.
What makes the cinematography distinctive?
Jean Dakar captures rural Macedonia with a painterly quality that never romanticizes poverty or abandonment—the images acknowledge beauty while documenting loss, creating a visual language that feels elegiac without becoming sentimental.
Why is this North Macedonia’s Oscar submission?
The film addresses universal themes—migration, economic displacement, environmental degradation—through a specifically Macedonian lens, offering international audiences insight into a culture while exploring concerns that transcend borders.
What does the film ultimately argue?
It doesn’t argue—it witnesses. Kotevska presents the consequences of policies that make family farming unsustainable, then trusts viewers to understand what happens when entire ways of life become economically impossible.
