Joint winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, EO, made its way to my home city and it was just as harrowing as the first time I watched it. Jerzy Skolimowski’s masterfully soulful film forces us to experience a complex and cruel world through the lens of a donkey. Both inspired and inspiring, we are taken on the harshest journey imaginable: the journey of an animal alongside humans.
We begin in a disorienting space with flashing red lights and a donkey on the ground. Encouraged to stand by Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), we see that the donkey, EO, is with a travelling circus. Whether or not he has any particular act to follow, the sensory overload brings us (literally) eye-to-eye with EO’s fear of standing in a circus in front of a drunken audience. However, when the circus’s animals are repossessed, EO embarks on a bewildering odyssey from place to place with little opportunity for respite.