EO

EO, a gray donkey with an alert mind, knows only life in his traveling circus alongside his loving trainer Kasandra. When the circus has to close and EO is separated from Kasandra, he embarks on a journey through Poland and Italy, where the patient four-legged friend encounters warmth and kindness, but also pain. EO encounters people who support him or stand in his way, some benevolent, some cruel, including a young Italian priest, a countess (Isabelle Huppert), and a Polish soccer team... Great cinema, with great film-historical role models: veteran director Jerzy Skolimowski tells an impressive road movie from the perspective of a donkey – touching, visually impressive and showered with awards at numerous festivals. He lets EO quietly observe the follies and triumphs of the earth's inhabitants and carves out a rather unflattering picture of them. "In contrast, Skolimowski, who is also a painter, creates his own visually impressive world of images for his donkey. Sometimes the camera takes the perspective of a bird gliding over a red-colored riverbed, other times the perspective of an ant watching Eo from the grass, making him appear gigantic and blurred. In the nighttime forest, Eo enters a fairy-tale world consisting of frogs, bubbling water, and spiders. [...] In this way, Skolimowski explores the soul of a donkey, its spirituality. The donkeys of this world may not care. But it makes us viewers, at least for the duration of this film, perhaps a little better people." (Philipp Stadelmaier, on: sueddeutsche.de) "The fable is also unmistakably a homage to ‘Au Hasard Balthasar’, Robert Bresson's masterpiece about the suffering of a donkey. Skolimowski saw the film when it was released in 1966, and the final scene was the first and only time he cried in a cinema. Skolimowski transfers this unusual emotionality to ‘EO’. [...] The result is visually fascinating and completely unbroken in its empathy with the animal, without becoming kitschy." (Thomas Abeltshauser, on: epd-film.de)