TIFF 2025: The story of Silyan, Love + War, The Balloonist | Festivals and awards

The most overcrowded ambitious calendar in my ten years of TIFF attendance has still not allowed many true stories, but I have been able to catch up with three documentaries for this dispatch, including the last lyric director of the “Honeyland” nominated at Oscars. Tamara Kotevska “The story of Silyan” is a beautiful character study of a man and an injured stork, which intertwines the mythology and the fate of the people who work on a dying land in a short and effective work.

Nicola and Jana work on the ground in the country of origin of Kotevska, Macedonia. In a first scene, they literally bring three tonnes of potatoes to sell, to go home with the unusable harvest due to growing regulations and wholesalers looking for irrational offers. It is not that the land does not support these people in their efforts to continue their work to distribute generation, it is that the system dropped them.

Jana leaves their house to look for income elsewhere, leaving Nicola alone in this beautiful country, where he finds a stork with a broken wing. He takes the bird to get help and is essentially said that the only way to save the life of the animal is that Nicola takes care of him. And so he does. Kotevska’s film is largely made up of this stoic man who takes care of this magnificent creature. Nothing should be said to find beauty in imaging.

Kotevska links Nicola’s arc in Macedonian folk tale which gives the film his title on a boy who is transformed into a stork, but it is a film that works best in his silence. There are photos of storks that fly above the head that almost resemble CGI, like these scenes of “planet earth” which are so vibrant that they seem almost false. And Kotevska balances this beauty with the simplicity of people who live from the earth, arguing that there is also an equal beauty through connection.

The winners of the Chai Vasarhelyi Oscars and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”) returned to Tiff this year with “Love + War” “ A film directed by partner journalists on partners in the world of journalism. A little too polite in the way of Natgeo, the film is always an effective character study by a courageous conflict photographer who seems obsessed with half her life in which she is not at all times. When she is in the country, she thinks of her husband and sons at home. When she’s at home, she can’t stop thinking about it, she could do with her camera. At a time when journalism seems to be more and more attacked, profiles of people like Lynsey Addario feel more essential than ever. While newspapers and magazines give in the field in less forms, we will need courageous people like Addario just to know what is going on in the world. The camera does not lie.

The photojournalist winner of the Pulitzer Prize has traveled the world, and the cameras of Vasarelyi and Chin join her in Ukraine while she documents the atrocities. In what is essentially a bio -doc – sometimes too much, because a stronger version could have included a wider context on the industry and the place of Addario – we intend to talk about the development and the formative stories of Addario told in places like Sierra Leone and the Middle East. In a particularly breathtaking story told in photography and interviews, Addario conveys a woman to die in childbirth because she could not get the care she needed. We also hear that she is kidnapped in Libya, further revealing the increased danger of photojournalism. Someone says at some point that their ability is both “… in their photos … and that it is always alive”.

The truth is that the unwritten rules concerning the death of journalists disappeared at the time when they were coated with claims of false news. Crimes against them increased by 50% in 2022 according to a title that splashed on the screen. Why continue to do it? Because it is important. But Addario is torn between a world that needs it and children who do it too, especially since her 10 -year -old child seems more aware of the choices made by the mother. A scene in which he mainly begs her not to leave is a sorrow. As much as she knows that he wants to stay, she knows that she must go.

Finally, John Dower “Les Balloons” is a well-intentioned but fairly dry story of the story of Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, two very different types of personality which had to find common ground above the earth. They became the first pair to go around the globe in a hot air balloon in 1999, an idea made magical by fiction for more than a century before it actually occurred as part of a competition which included Richard Branson.

Dower has a truly impressive quantity of sequences of real competition, including segments with Piccard and Jones above the earth, and the film is at its best when it becomes granular, entering in detail like jets and avoiding enemy air space. It takes a little too much time to get there – too much of the first half hour consists of people who speak in crushed sound stings on the graceful beauty of the ball – but Dower’s film ends up getting up just high enough so that it can be worth seeing all the streaming service that ultimately attracts it.