01/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: Honeyland director Tamara Kotevska’s super-polished new documentary pairs a 17th-century Macedonian folktale with a present-day social story

Honeyland [+see also:
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interview: Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara K…
interview: Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir S…
film profile] and The Walk [+see also:
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film profile] director Tamara Kotevska returns with an accomplished and engaging, but overly polished, film that leaves too little to interpretation. The Tale of Silyan has world-premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.

The documentary borrows its title from a 17th-century Macedonian folktale, which the rough-voiced, off-screen narrator tells us throughout the film. In it, a young boy named Silyan doesn’t want to partake in the gruelling farming life of his family, so his father punishes him by turning him into a stork, cursed to always migrate and never have land of his own.

In the present day, we meet our protagonist, 60-year-old farmer Nikola, and his family – wife Jana, daughter Ana, and her husband and small daughter. They work the fields, farming tobacco, watermelons, potatoes and peppers, and it is all very idyllic and uplifting, until they realise the government measures have rendered the produce prices unsustainable. They are not the only ones: farmers stage a protest, destroying their crops by running them over with tractors.

Ana decides to take her family to Germany in search of a better life, but things are difficult with a small child, so Jana joins them to help. This leaves Nikola on his own, and he puts his land up for sale and replaces farming by working at a landfill as a bulldozer and tractor driver.

Their village is home to the largest population of storks in North Macedonia, and as Nikola’s closest friend Ilija explains, the birds used to follow tractors in the fields to peck at the remaining fruits and vegetables. Now, they feed at the landfill. Nikola finds one with a broken wing and adopts him.

Kotevska’s approach to the themes rings very true: the decline of small farmers, economic migration and the dissolution of the wider family unit in the Balkans, the environmental angle, and even the friendship between a sensitive, old man and a beautiful animal. However, the storytelling is so unambiguous and linear, and the production so polished, that it is difficult to trust it as a documentary. That’s not to say that anything is fake; just that the construction feels too convenient.

The smoothly arranged sequence of events, in which every action has an immediate and direct consequence, combined with expositional dialogues, gives us all the answers, while the pairing of Nikola’s story with the folktale checks way too many boxes, leaving no room for interpretation on the viewer’s part and leaving them in complete comfort. On the production side, DoP and producer Jean Dakar’s majestic widescreen cinematography counterpoints long shots of storks in flight with high-detail scenes of them feeding their young, along with frequent and pointed focus shifts, complex compositions with figures perfectly positioned in a frame, and intense colours and strong contrast. Joe Wilson Davies and Hun Oukpark’s sweeping orchestral score expectedly incorporates some local colouring via Balkan flutes and drums, as well as the diegetic clacking of storks’ beaks combined with percussion. It is a gorgeous, topical, engaging, easy-to-watch film, but so much so that that very fact might be its biggest problem.

Co-produced by high-profile US companies Concordia Studio and The Corner Shop, along with Kotevska and Dakar’s own Ciconia Film (North Macedoni), The Tale of Silyan is handled internationally by Dogwoof. With its local setting, universal thematic scope, and launch pad at Venice and Toronto, its director might be hoping for her second Oscar nomination.