Director:
Jerzy Skolimowski
Producer:
Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski, Eileen Tasca and Jeremy Thomas
Editor:
Agnieszka Glińska
Music:
Paweł Mykietyn
Screenplay:
Ewa Piaskowska and Jerzy Skolimowski
Director of Photography:
Michał Dymek
Told through vignettes, the film’s anchor is the anthropomorphic eyes of a donkey (played by six different equines named Taco, Ola, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco, and Mela) that senses its way through the wheels of fortune. These include helpless indenturement inside a mobile circus (under the care of wide-eyed Kasandra, played by Sandra Drzymalska, Sole 2019), heading full speed for a glue factory on Mateo’s (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) lorry, a fractious adventure with prodigal-son-turned-priest Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), and a peek inside the so-called good life in the bourgeois home of a bored housewife named The Countess (Isabelle Huppert). To err is human, to forgive divine – and we are only left to guess what Eo – after seeing the best and worst of humanity – would do. A subtle reminder about the absolute cruelty of eating animals, Skolimowski’s chef d’oeuvre makes clear that we’re not so different from the most common beasts: we are born, briefly experience suffering and (if lucky) love, are unceremoniously exploited for our labour, and then we die.