"The title also refers to one of the real-life protagonists of the documentary, a white stork with "strong black wings" and eyes "reminiscent of Egyptian pharaohs" (per Silyan's participant bio) who's been injured and abandoned by his family at a landfill. The white stork is subsequently rescued and rehabbed by a human named Nikola, whose own loved ones have left him and their farm to work abroad."
"The week of The Tale of Silyan's Toronto premiere, following on the heels of Venice, Filmmaker reached out to the globetrotting North Macedonian director (who studied documentary filmmaking in Chattanooga on an exchange student scholarship in 2010), currently in post on her fiction debut Man vs. Flock; and who is set to follow Dolgan mammoth tusk hunters all the way to the northernmost area of the Siberian tundra for her next nonfiction foray."
The Tale of Silyan links a 17th-century Macedonian folktale about a boy transformed into a stork with the real-life story of an injured white stork rescued from a landfill. A human named Nikola rehabilitates the abandoned bird while coping with family members who work abroad. The film blends ancient myth and contemporary reality through nonintrusive cinematography and a soundtrack that relies on natural ambient sound. The narrative emphasizes ecosystem protection as a pathway to collective and personal healing. The director has festival momentum and ongoing projects spanning fiction and further nonfiction fieldwork in remote regions.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]