The Tale of Silyan (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for each stork (or flock of storks)
Take a Drink: whenever we return to the story of Silyan
Take a Drink: for each parallel between bird and human life
Do a Shot: stork chatter!
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Documentarian Tamara Kotevska won an Oscar at the age of 26 for the superb Honeyland, about a North Macedonia beekeeper. She already is prepping another film about Siberian reindeer herders. She definitely has an aesthetic.
The Tale of Silyan follows Nicola, a North Macedonian farmer with a particular connection to the storks which plentifully inhabit his rural town.
A Toast
Kotevska finds another idiosyncratic pairing of mankind and nature here in Nicola, a truly gentle man with the care and patience to nurse a stork with a broken wing back to health. He clearly loves his wife, family, and town, but times are changing- making a living from farming, much as anywhere, is increasingly difficult. When economic circumstances see his children and grandchildren, and eventually wife, go abroad, the stork in need of help emerges. An initial visit to the vet is hilarious. “No, he doesn’t like cat food.” But he quickly learns what this beautiful animal needs.
Kotevska has crafted another portrait of life off the well-beaten path, once more replete with eye-meltingly gorgeous compositions of verdant fields and birds in flight. She poetically rhymes Nicola and his family’s plight and the natural cycles (and unnatural intrusions of pollution and other trappings of modernity) of the storks. She does not shy from the harsher truths of nature, but what is the sweet without the bitter?
Beer Two
This is a film to really be ready to sit back and relax while watching. Its rhythms are slow and it can feel like we’re discovering the story as Kotevska is, but that’s also the distinct charm of her approach.
Verdict
The Tale of Silyan is an unremittingly gorgeous, uniquely sensitive portrait of rural Macedonian life, both human and stork.
