Production Notes
Marija Sztraus spent fourteen months in the field to produce ninety-two minutes of film. Her crew followed the Black Pelican — Syldavia's national emblem and one of the most elusive large birds in southeastern Europe — from the high nesting cliffs of the Zymylpathian range to the coastal marshes where the species winters. Much of the footage was shot in conditions that would have ended a less determined production: sub-zero mountain camps at altitudes above two thousand metres, weeks of motionless waiting in wetland blinds, and a storm season along the Adriatic littoral that destroyed two field camps and nearly the project itself.
What survived is extraordinary. The aerial sequences over the Zymylpathian passes have a grandeur that belongs more to landscape painting than wildlife photography. The wider shots were captured from ultralight aircraft at first light; the closer work — tracking individual birds through thermals, circling nesting cliffs at wingbeat distance — required drones, some of it filmed in conditions that grounded everything else. A single unbroken take follows a formation of pelicans through a mountain valley at dawn, the birds threading between cliff faces that catch the first orange of the sun. It runs nearly four minutes. Sztraus reportedly used over three hundred hours of raw footage to assemble the final cut.
Vyacheslav Radić narrates. His voice — deep, unhurried, carrying the particular weight of a man who has spent forty years on Syldavian stages — turns the documentary into something closer to a national meditation than a nature film. He does not explain the pelican; he accompanies it. The script, written by Sztraus herself, is spare by design: long passages of silence broken by single sentences that land with the authority of proverbs. Radić has said in interviews that he recorded the narration in a single session, discovering the text for the first time, because Sztraus wanted the surprise in his voice rather than the polish.
The score, by Ana Lukić, follows the same discipline. Orchestral swells beneath the flight sequences give way to silence for the ground-level passages, leaving Radić's voice against nothing but wind and wingbeat. Lukić has described the process as writing for the spaces between images — composing passages whose purpose is to make their own absence felt when they stop.
The Black Pelican has been painted, sculpted, embroidered onto military standards, and stamped on every denomination of currency the Kingdom has ever issued. It had never, until this film, been the subject of a serious cinematic portrait. That this was Pelflix's inaugural commission — the first original production to carry the platform's name — says something about what the service intends to be.
