“If you’re long enough with your topic, fascinating things happen,” the North Macedonian director tells Screen
After receiving two Oscar nominations for her 2019 documentary Honeyland, it might be suggested director Tamara Kotevska would have had an easier ride for her follow-up feature. But The Tale Of Silyan – her new nature documentary, character study and social commentary woven around a fairy tale – was a film she had to fight for at every stage of its dramatic journey to the screen. The Venice premiere is distributed worldwide by National Geographic, but it has not been smooth sailing.
“It was very difficult for this film, because it happened during the time when Macedonia was in a huge crisis in the film industry, and the film fund wasn’t working,” says Kotevska.
The crisis blocked the funds that had been earmarked for her fiction feature debut Man Vs Flock, and the North Macedonian director returned to documentary just to keep busy. A news article about storks falling ill after eating from landfill sparked her interest, so she and cinematographer and producer Jean Dakar bought equipment and set out in a customised van to start shooting.
“We decided to self-produce this short film and see how far we got,” says Kotevska. “We were doing this for maybe six months before we got the first co-producer attached, with very little grant funding. Then we had a co-producing partner from Macedonia who helped us find licences, connections, and who was working for free during this period.”
In fact, many local crew members worked for free initially, because they knew the story of Honeyland and trusted that – like that film’s tiny crew – they would be paid in the end.
“Then we started discovering more and more of this topic, more of the magic of the world of storks,” says Kotevska. Studying the storks naturally led her to the farmers whose fields were disappearing under landfill, with farming families forced to migrate to cities or abroad.
“The storks have been living in symbiosis with the humans for centuries, because the plants of the farmers attract little animals, and these attract the storks,” she says. “It’s a natural ecosystem and it’s starting to crash. That’s how we met a lot of farmers.
“We fell in love with these people, because I saw a resemblance between the families of storks and the families of humans, so I wanted to make the comparison between the two species.”
They quickly identified farmer Nikola and his family as their human focus. His daughter Ana had made the difficult decision to move to Germany with her husband and children in search of work and a better life – a migration that mirrored that of the storks. But after about a year, the filmmakers hit the limit of their funds.
“We had a gap of six months where we were quite desperate,” says Kotevska. “We couldn’t continue. Eventually we found [production company] Concordia, who fell in love with the project and finalised the funding so we could keep going.”
In the second year of the three-year production, much of the equipment was stolen from the village where they were based, including some of their stores of precious footage. “It was very devastating, the worst thing that can happen to a filmmaker,” recalls Kotevska. “We had some low moments where we wanted to quit, but thankfully, thanks to Concordia, we managed to finish the film.”
Higher calling
The result is an effort that is more ambitious than Honeyland, but with the same intimate focus on its subjects. Kotevska and Dakar leaned more heavily on drone footage this time, following the storks into the air.
It was disconcerting for the first generation of birds they filmed, who often reacted badly to the noise. But it was old news to the third generation that was being following by the time filming wrapped.
Kotevska also followed the farmers in their protests against government policies that threaten their livelihoods, making small-scale farming unprofitable. Over a three-year period, Kotevska and Dakar visited Nikola and his family for days or weeks at a time, trying to figure out the best times to capture the storks’ behaviour or the key moments in the farmers’ lives.
But just as they were about to wrap, providence finally came down on the film’s side. Nikola, who in desperation had taken a job at the landfill, found an injured stork and started nursing it back to health. The two became fast friends – providing Kotevska with a perfect, poetic cap to her story.
“If you’re long enough with your topic, these fascinating things happen because you’re very open to observing this reality,” she says. “The smallest changes can bring a huge, dramatic change in the film. This wasn’t a small change, but it could have been. If he had given the stork to the vet, the story would end there.”
Instead, Nikola’s act of kindness unlocked a whole new aspect to the film. It reminded Kotevska of a fairy tale, one of the oldest in Macedonian storytelling, about a boy called Silyan who is transformed into a stork.
“I never thought about using this tale until the very last moment when he captured the stork,” says Kotevska. “It was just too good not to use as a metaphor.” She asked people in the village for their versions of the oft-told tale, recorded their accounts and included the most relevant pieces as narration to complete the tapestry.
The Tale Of Silyan has yet to open in North Macedonia, so Kotevska cannot judge if there will be a backlash to the film’s sometimes pointed critique of government policy. But she told the story she wanted to tell, and has been rewarded with a nomination apiece at the Independent Spirits and PGA Awards, alongside two wins at the International Documentary Association Awards, including best feature.
Her statement denouncing corruption in the film agency back when funding was cut has not stopped the film being selected as North Macedonia’s entry for the Academy Awards, nor hampered her filmmaking plans since.
That delayed first feature, Man Vs Flock, a fictional film about China’s New Silk Road trading route that runs through the Balkans, shot last summer and is in post-production. Kotevska originally researched the topic with plans to make a documentary, but found it could only be told in fiction form. Later this year, she and Dakar head to north Siberia to continue shooting their next documentary, about Dolgan hunters of mammoth tusks.
“We shot for one month, and that’s an exciting project,” she says. “We are following the conflict between the traditional reindeer herders and the new mammoth tusk hunters who come out of this tribe and decide to go on that path.”
Gathering mammoth bones on the tundra to sell to dealers can be lucrative for the Dolgan, but also dangerous – and it leads to conflict between fathers and sons, which fascinates Kotevska.
“I’m going after the stories that I love telling,” she explains. “At the moment, I’m choosing the genre depending on if I can tell the story in that way, or another way. The story is the leader. The genre is just the form that is most suitable.”
No comments yet