Forget dogs — in The Tale of Silyan, man’s new best friend is the stork. The lyrical documentary from Oscar nominee Tamara Kotevska (Honeyland) returns to her North Macedonia home in crafting the portrait of 60-year-old Nikola Conev, a hardworking farmer struggling to keep his family afloat amid harsh environmental conditions and government intervention. The film potently speaks to universal concerns around the impact of climate change and the brutal economic realities being faced by rural communities, but its most distinctive aspect — the bond that develops between Nikola, after his family leaves for better opportunities abroad, and the film’s titular wounded stork — is anything but a downer.

Kotevska and her frequent collaborator, cinematographer Jean Dakar, started out by simply following storks around to study their shifting migration patterns and their increased feeding from landfills. “The storks brought us to the human world,” Kotevska says, because the species typically lives off of farms but has suffered in parallel to humans because of their diminishment.

The official environmental organization of North Macedonia gave the filmmakers a map of the stork nests in the country, and they spent years tracking packs.

The movie feels as much like a nature documentary as it does a character study. Silyan is characterized by lingering, intimate shots of the storks in action, their timeless beauty bumping up against modernity. It’s hard to believe they’re as unmoved as they seem by the cameras in their faces and the drones flying overhead.

“We were filming three generations of storks, because storks tend to come back to the same nests,” Dakar says. “We took advantage of this because they familiarized themselves with us, with our way of work, with our equipment. That’s how we ended up getting closer and closer. One generation of storks actually grew up with us. They were completely unfazed.”

The entire filming process took about three years. For most of that time, the project was unfunded — with Kotevska and Dakar reliant only on each other’s continued interest. “We’d sleep in the van. We just went for months, lost in the wilderness, because it did require a lot of commitment,” Kotevska says. “You have to be ready to go outside the system, to the point of self-funding it for one or two years, until some producer or distributor comes on board.”

The film’s subject, Nikola Conev. Jean Daka/Ciconia Film

Gradually, the process formalized and led the filmmakers to Nikola, whose daughter and son-in-law leave for Germany early on in the film to pursue a better life. Then, Nikola’s wife decides to join them and help with childcare. It’s a subtly devastating scene, since the filmmakers are inside the family home when this news breaks. “We ended up spending a great deal of time with Nikola and his wife, so much so that we managed to break the barrier and ended up getting physically close when we were shooting,” Dakar says. “The more time you’re spending with them, the more natural and organic the collaboration becomes.”

It’s quite similar to the way Dakar describes building a rapport with the storks. For these storytellers, it was one and the same.

“We were accepted as part of their family,” Kotevska adds. “They didn’t have issues showing all of this. They wanted to show their struggles, including the falling apart of the family, [which happened] because of these government issues.”

In gorgeous close-ups, we see a solitary Nikola lovingly nurse Silyan the stork back to health, rediscovering his own sense of purpose along that journey. Kotevska remembers one day of shooting as a kind of “miracle,” when Dakar captured a flock of storks flying off a landfill and onto Nikola’s land in real time after spotting Silyan. The hopeful image calls back to when Nikola first found Silyan injured in a landfill.

There were surely others, but there’s a whole lot that we don’t get to witness — and that’s where Dakar’s fondest memories lie. “What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “Ninety percent of it is just research and observing and studying the animals — their behavior, feeding times, blah, blah, blah. Which I guess can seem boring. But I really loved it.”

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.