A broken stork and a broken farmer become unlikely soulmates in this slow, poetic documentary about loss, myth, and rural collapse in Macedonia.
If you liked “My Octopus Teacher”, you’ll likely enjoy this too.
So I added it to our list of 10 Documentaries Like “My Octopus Teacher” (just behind “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”!).
Trailer for “The Tale of Silyan”
You Can’t Make This Sh!t Up
- A farmer named Nikola watches his whole village dwindle from 300 working farms to just 50. Then he joins his neighbors in publicly torching their own produce rather than sell it to middlemen for cents.
- Nikola builds this bird a custom nest in a room of his dilapidated farmhouse that once belonged to his missing son.
Watch “The Tale of Silyan”
You can watch “The Tale of Silyan” for free on Documentary.org.
Also listed on JustWatch.
Ratings:
- My Rating: 91/100
- IMDB Rating: 7.4/10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: not yet rated (Users); 100/100 (Critics)
Director’s Note: The film’s creative structure—braiding a living man’s story with a centuries-old folktale—creates a meditative mood. It’s not flashy, but it lingers. A poetic take on grief, migration, and the quiet companionship between man and beast.
Release Date: 2025 (streaming free online)
My Review of “The Tale of Silyan”
The Setup
Nikola is a 60-year-old farmer who lives alone in a rural Macedonian village gutted by economic collapse. After losing his wife and daughter to economic migration, he finds an injured white stork at a landfill and brings it home.
He names the bird “Silyan”—just like the boy from the folktale who was cursed by his father and turned into a stork. As the film plays both stories in parallel, it blurs reality with myth, showing how grief rewrites logic.
More Highlights from the Doc
- After his wife and daughter leave for Germany to survive, Nikola ends up working at a landfill where he rescues a stork with a mangled wing.
- We see raw footage of farmers destroying tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in protest. It’s less about rage and more about heartbreak—entire harvests wasted to make a point.
- Nikola’s relationship with the stork is wordless but deep. He cooks for it, checks its bandages, and even argues with it like it’s a real person—especially when it won’t eat.
- Locals stop by the house and quietly joke that the stork is his son returned. But they say it with just enough seriousness that you wonder if *they* believe it.
- We get a close look at rural Macedonian life in freefall—farms dying, houses abandoned, traditions fading. This is a story about more than one man’s grief; it’s about a culture slipping away.
Lesser-Known Details from the Doc
- The stork is real—and the footage is intimate. You see Nikola carefully wash its wing, feed it raw meat, and build a perch out of scrap wood in the middle of his crumbling home.
- Much of the doc is silent—just bird calls, wind, and the creak of an old house. There’s no narration. The emotion comes from the pacing and long-held shots of Nikola watching…or being watched.
- Despite being surrounded by decay, Nikola always looks up. He scans the sky for the stork’s mate, hoping someday she’ll return too.
Wrap Up:
“The Tale of Silyan” is small, strange, and beautifully slow. If you like documentaries that blend folklore and raw humanity, this one is worth your time.
Thanks for reading!
Heather Fenty, Guest Writer, Daily Doc