Focus on female filmmakers: Tamara Kotevska on “The Tale of Silyan” | Interviews

A few years ago, the Macedonian film “Honeyland” made history as the first documentary to be nominated in the categories of Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. This year, his co-director Tamara Kotevska returns with the equally poetic and politically searing documentary “The Tale of Silyan,” which could very well receive the same double honor this awards season.

Inspired by the heartbreaking fact that storks, North Macedonia’s national bird, were falling ill after farmland was converted into landfills, Kotevska teamed up with her longtime cinematographer and producer, Jean Dakar, to film the storks as they followed their new migration paths. During filming, they discovered the story of Nikola, a farmer from North Macedonia whose farm was going bankrupt due to new government policies, forcing his family to immigrate abroad in search of financial stability. Finding work at one of the dumps, Nikola befriends an injured stork, a relationship that will prove transformative for both the farmer and the filmmakers.

Kotevska soon realized that what was happening to the people of her country reflected the traditional folk tale that gives the film its title, using its text and lesson as a framing device and form of storytelling. With its lush cinematography and deeply humanist tone, Kotevska’s film marries observational cinema techniques with magical realism to create a fiery screed against capitalism, industrialization, governments that profit from people, and an elegy for our fragile connection to nature.

Born in Prilep, Republic of Macedonia (now called North Macedonia), during her junior year of high school, Kotevska earned a study abroad scholarship that took her to Tennessee, United States. She later studied drama at Sts. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, with emphasis on documentary cinema. His first feature-length documentary, “Lake of Apples,” co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov, follows a year in the life of Lake Prespa, one of the oldest freshwater lakes on the planet. She reunited with Stefanov for “Honeyland,” a portrait of Hatidže Muratova, a wild beekeeper whose way of life in the isolated mountain village of Bekirlija is threatened by the arrival of new arrivals.

Kotevska went solo for her next feature, “The Walk,” which centers on a young Syrian refugee named Asil who uses a giant puppet, Amal, to process her trauma. His latest film, “Silyan’s Story,” debuted at the Venice Film Festival and was selected as the Macedonian entry for best international feature film at this year’s Oscars.

For this month’s Women Filmmakers in Brief section, RogerEbert.com spoke to Kotevska via email about the importance of learning from past generations, the dangerous times we live in, and finding hope in all this madness.

How did you first develop your style of filmmaking, combining observational cinema and magical realism?

I come from a country without a culture of watching documentaries, and I have loved them since I was a child. It has been my passion to make documentaries since I was twelve years old. I was looking for creative ways to tell stories that would bring documentaries closer to audiences. Eventually, the whole world came to appreciate my new approaches, not just the Macedonians.

Can you talk about your collaborative process with Jean Dakar?

This is our second collaboration across four films that we have shot together as director-cinematographer. We are extremely dedicated to our work. We are extremely passionate about giving our all to make a film and we don’t do any commercial work. We dedicate ourselves entirely to making arthouse films with all the time and resources we have.

I love the vet scene and how comedic moments like this ground the film in humanism. Can you talk about finding that balance in editing?

I was editing while filming. That way I had an idea of ​​what I had and where this film was going to go. I love working with my editor, Martin Ivanov from Macedonia. With Jean Dakar, we are like the Three Musketeers: one for all, all for one. We would go to endless lengths to make a film even if the odds are against this film. Personally, I really like editing. We often get stuck for 20 hours straight in non-stop editing because the process absorbs us so much. We are willing to experiment a lot with editing until we find the best solutions; we just don’t stop.

I found the scenes where the storks began looking for food in the garbage dumps heartbreaking. At what point did this become part of the film’s narrative?

These are the first shots we took: storks eating in landfills. It was my initial idea to make this film. Understanding that storks were disappearing because they were feeding on landfills was devastating to me. The stork is my favorite animal. It is the national symbol of my country. I launched into this story to then discover a whole universe.

You spent months learning how to film storks, then months with Nikola and his family. At what point did you notice the similarities with the traditional Tale of Silyan and decide to incorporate it as a narrative framework for your film?

Around the second year of filming, when Nikola finds the stork.

Can you talk a little about how the film critiques capitalism? Specifically, I’m thinking about how the government doesn’t support farms and how his family emigrated to Germany to make more money, even though everything is more expensive there.

We live in perilous times where governments around the world are trying to monopolize basic human resources, such as food and water, and charge for absolutely everything. They want to control price increases on their own terms and at their own pace. I consider this to be the biggest problem, the consequences of which will still be felt in the long term, for generations to come. Farmer protests are happening around the world today because governments are unwilling to pay them fair prices for their crops and the hard work they do. Governments are trying to discourage individual food production and buying up all land, depriving ordinary people of the ability and knowledge to produce their own food, will turn this into a contemporary form of enslavement of humanity.

Similarly, the film explores how industrialization (i.e. capitalism) leaves traditional agrarian life behind, but folktales help us stay connected to ancient knowledge. Can you tell us a little about how you connect to these themes in your work?

I love mythology and always find deeper meaning in it. A message that can be applied today in modern society. I believe that we should not cut the strings of our past, because life did not begin with us today, and this contemporary approach to life is very self-centered and destructive. I believe we should be able to look back and learn from our past to create a better life for future generations.

You mentioned in another interview that there are other ways to define success in life than capital gains, and that there are different ways to feel fulfilled. Do you think that your films help to bring this concept forward to the public?

This is actually my statement in the very first interview we did at the Venice Film Festival. I was asked if I felt guilty making films about poor people. My response to that was that I absolutely don’t make films for poor people. I make films that show how rich some people are because there are other ways to define wealth, measured in terms of autonomy, humility, love, family and perception of nature. My film is about very rich people, in that sense, who are threatened with losing everything because of government policies.

I love this quote from you: “Rather than creating empathy for the poor, I want to spark the revolution of these people who have everything, and they should not give up what they have. » Can you tell us more about what you hope people will feel when they finish watching the film?

It wasn’t my intention to make a hopeful ending, because I didn’t see one. I thought this movie would end up in landfills, with humans and storks thrown in there. But life had different plans. It showed me that there is hope even in the darkest places. The story took a completely different direction when Nikola found this stork that I liked a lot more.

Are there any filmmakers who have inspired you or who you think readers should look out for?

There are several. Alice Guy-Blaché was a French filmmaker considered one of the first female directors in the history of cinema, who also made documentary-style films. Japan’s first female director, Tazuko Sakane, was one of the world’s first female documentary filmmakers. She made documentaries about the adverse effects of war during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Soviet editor Yelizaveta Svilova worked on the iconic documentary “Man with a Movie Camera.” She also made political documentaries in the 1940s, such as “The Fall of Berlin” and “The Nuremberg Trials.” There is of course Agnès Varda, a key figure of the French New Wave, recognized as a documentary director and pioneer of social commentary in her work.

Jane Campion, best known for films like “The Piano” and “The Power of the Dog,” is a filmmaker whose work explores complex female characters and relationships. Mila Turajlić (Serbian Cyrillic: Мила Tураjлић) is a Serbian filmmaker who directed and produced the award-winning films “The Other Side of Everything” and “Cinema Komunisto”. Documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite has produced a number of television documentaries over the past two decades, but is best known for 2013’s “Blackfish,” which earned her worldwide recognition as a director and a BAFTA nomination.

Barbara Kopple has appeared on every list of best documentarians since the mid-’90s. She has won not one but two Academy Awards for her documentary work, which often dissects American culture. She’s also not afraid to make films about intriguing people, including their controversies, like Woody Allen and his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn (“Wild Man Blues”), or the anti-war backlash of the Dixie Chicks (“Shut Up and Sing”).