The Tale of Silyan
2025 Macedonian documentary film directed by Tamara Kotevska
The Tale of Silyan (Macedonian: Приказната за Силјан) is a 2025 Macedonian documentary film produced, written and directed by Tamara Kotevska. It follows Macedonian farmer Nikola Conev and his family in the backdrop of the country's economic instability. While Conev forms a bond with an injured white stork, his daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, and wife move to Germany in search of better life.
The film had its world premiere out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2025, it was theatrically released in North Macedonia on September 22, and in the United States on November 28 by Picturehouse.
It was selected as the Macedonian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.
Summary
Somewhere in North Macedonia, Nikola and Jana Conev are a poor farmer couple who grow potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, and tobacco. The white storks in the area form a symbiotic relationship with the farmers as the fertile land offers prey for the birds, which construct their nests on the village rooftops. The country, one of the few in the continent which is not a part of the European Union, faces looming economical instability. This causes markets to shrink and prices for crops to hit an all-time low, depriving the Conevs and their fellow farmers of income as they are unable to sell their products. Protesting against the government's policies, the farmers block city roads with their rotten crops.
“The Tale of Silyan” enters the record as 2025 Macedonian documentary film directed by Tamara Kotevska. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tale, Silyan and Macedonian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q135910014. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Tale of Silyan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.