EO
West Coast Premiere
LAUGH | WORLD
Poland, Italy 2022, 86 min, Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Revered Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski creates a new way of seeing the world in a film that chronicles nature’s beauty alongside human kindness and cruelty, from a donkey’s point of view. While comparisons are inevitable to Robert Bresson’s conceptually similar 1966 masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar, this extraordinary tale is its own beguiling beast, playing with color and sound to render our silent protagonist’s journey across Poland and Italy an entrancing, hyper-vivid odyssey. Recent documentaries such as Gunda and Cow have sought to illuminate the lives of animals without resorting to cloying anthropomorphism, and EO, the winner of this year’s Cannes Jury Prize, takes this approach to the next level. Through this donkey’s expressive eyes, and its alternately hypnotic, whimsical, and disturbing adventures, the film illustrates how mad and magical everyday life can be—and that’s before Isabelle Huppert shows up near the end for a riveting, scene-stealing cameo. —Tim Grierson
In Polish, Italian, English, and French with English subtitles
THANK YOU TO OUR COMMUNITY PARTNER CINEMAITALIA SF