“The Tale of Silyan” (watch the trailer below) is hands-down the year’s most beautiful documentary, an incredibly thoughtful non-fiction depiction of the relationship between an elderly man in North Macedonia and a stork he befriends from a junk heap. Nikola is trying desperately to hold onto his family farm after his family leaves him to find steadier employment in Germany, and the stork becomes his companion.

It’s a real-life incident strikingly like a centuries-old Macedonian folktale about a prodigal son who only finds a relationship with his father again after he turns into a stork. But it was never director Tamara Kotevska’s (“Honeyland”) intention to find a real-life version of “The Tale of Silyan.” Life, closely observed by her over years in this case, just happened to mirror art.

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In fact, Kotevska followed Nikola’s family for a year and a half before the stork Nikola befriended even entered the picture. She thought she was just making a documentary about how globalization was causing mass migration… which intersected with her interest in the migratory patterns of her home country’s beloved storks. After Nikola’s stork enters his life, she continued filming for another year. The result is a glimpse of the eternal, a glimpse at how the myths we tell contain deep, transcendent truths that remain relevant across centuries.

Watch the trailer for “The Tale of Silyan” below and then read on for a brief interview with Kotevska.

IndieWire: How did you find Nikola and his family, to even make them the subject of your documentary?

Tamara Kotevska: The storks led us to them. I had been interested in how farms being turned into landfills had changed where storks were getting their food, and how that was changing their migratory patterns. And while shooting this, we did a lot of footage of storks eating from the people’s lands and the farming lands. So they introduced us to the families that were farming and one of these families were Nikola’s family, and we loved them, and we decided to stick with his family and to keep following them.

As a Macedonian, the “Tale of Silyan” itself, the actual myth or fairy tale legend about a father and his son-turned-stork, was something you grew up with? It was something that was part of your family heritage that had been passed down that you were aware of from childhood?

Yes, absolutely. This is the first tale I’d ever heard in my life from my farming grandparents. It’s a very popular tale. It’s like Snow White or Red Riding Hood. It’s that popular in Macedonia. But I never planned to use it until I realized the connection and the locals started making fun of Nikola. “Oh, it’s Silyan. It’s the stork from the story.” So it became like a joke, but then I realized when I went back to the story, actually it has a deeper meaning, so let’s try to use it in a modern context and recycle this tale.

There are scenes of such intimacy in this documentary, that it’s astonishing you happened to be there to catch them. I’m thinking of the moment when you actually capture Nikola and his wife on a Facetime call and his children ask his wife to come join them in Germany… meaning that Nikola will be totally left alone in Macedonia. How was that even possible to capture?

It’s a combination of research, very thorough research, to the point where, as a documentary filmmaker, you also can predict some things. Just like when you record nature, you make biological research on the nature and the animal you’re following, and somehow you can predict where, in which areas it’s going to happen to eat or to sleep or just some things like this.

When you live with a subject, and I always want to spend the time living with my subjects, it’s my only rule really. So I spend a lot of time being in their house. We were actually also sleeping in their house and spending time there. So I want to observe their reality, I want to become their friend, to understand what’s happening in the life. So I am able to kind of predict moments, dramatic moments, that are about to occur, such as also the protests [depicted in the film].

This particular moment [of Nikola realizing he’d be left behind altogether], there were plenty of moments like this in advance that actually didn’t get to the cut because they’re a very open family who speak openly about stuff and they didn’t just care about the camera being present. And this conversation was mentioned, actually, many times, not just once because the daughter was constantly calling and complaining about how difficult is the life there [in Germany]. So it was kind of a repetitive conversation that we just choose this particular one, but it was an ongoing issue.

So much of this film is about how we don’t have control, how humans, like animals, are subject to forces almost outside of our comprehension that rule our lives. Such as the market forces that forced Nikola’s family to seek another life elsewhere. Or the animal instinct that controls the migration patterns of the storks.

This is one reason why I love mythology and myths and folk tales because they are holding the knowledge that we cannot lose. They seem irrelevant today, but actually they’re very relevant because our ancestors came to certain conclusions and they wanted to transmit their knowledge and their conclusions through myths, and they added magic in it so that it catches people’s attention.

In a way, it’s what we are doing today with cinema. We are finding creative ways how to send a message. And the wider we can spread it and to capture people’s attention creatively, the better, so they can get informed about a certain danger of our times. So I really find importance in recycling this kind of ancient knowledge and lost knowledge and mythology because it’s always been in the history of humanity that new generations were learning from the old. Only in today’s time do new generations feel kind of smarter than the old and try to live in a certain way or embrace certain modern knowledge and concepts, such as leaning on AI and the internet, which turns out to be unsustainable. That’s why I’m so interested and engaged in exploring these indigenous cultures that are dying out.

National Geographic will release “The Tale of Silyan” in theaters on Friday, November 28.

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