Warm and tender hints of the great “animal rescue” movies, from White Fang to Fly Away Home, flow through this otherwise angry docudrama from the Macedonian film-maker Tamara Kotevska. Her debut feature, Honeyland, tackled environmental decline in her home country and here she focuses on a village in north Macedonia, called Cesinovo, where farmers who practise sustainable agricultural techniques (scything, horse-ploughing) are driven into bankruptcy by globalisation and governmental incompetence.

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Cesinovo, however, is also home to the largest white stork population in Macedonia so the film, courtesy of Kotevska’s acrobatic camerawork, is soon swooping and diving with these elegant avians and clinging to a charismatic loner with a broken wing. He’s nicknamed Silyan, after a character in a Macedonian folk tale, and is adopted by a destitute farmer, Nikola, whose extended family have fled to Germany as economic migrants. Nikola’s loving bond with the bird begins to alleviate his despair, while the story of the mythical Silyan is told intermittently in a husky voiceover, culled by Kotevska from a fireside sequence that, cleverly, only fully arrives in the film’s closing moments.

Some of the obvious reference points here are The Wild Robot (about a bird “imprinting” on a carer) and the recent Steve Coogan drama The Penguin Lessons but thankfully this is a film determined to avoid accusations of schmaltz. Fabulous visual gags abound nonetheless, including Silyan popping his head up and down from the back seat of Nikola’s car and, best of all, a sight gag straight out of Looney Tunes involving Silyan prematurely testing, from a great height, his newly “recovered” wing.

Arguments will rage about how much of this is staged and how much captured. The film-makers have labelled the film “a documentary fable” and that works for me. It’s that place where Ken Loach and David Attenborough meet. In the best possible sense.
★★★★☆
12A, 80min
In cinemas

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