EO
Unconventional road movie from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski featuring an escaped circus donkey as the main character. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes.
For EO (the film title is an onomatopoeia and refers to the braying sound of donkeys: eee-ohhh), Skolimowski was inspired by AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966), Robert Bresson’s classic that follows the life (and agonies) of a donkey. Skolimowski calls Bresson’s masterpiece the only film that ever moved him to tears.
As in AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, in EO we see the world through the eyes of an animal. Eo, a grey donkey with beautiful melancholic eyes, meets both bad and good people on his life path. At the beginning of the film, an action from animal right activists results in Eo getting separated from the young circus woman who cared for him. For Eo, it marks the beginning of a ramble across Europe, in which the animal is at the mercy of the people he meets along the way.
With EO, Skolimowski joins the series of recent films (see, for example, GUNDA and COW) in which prominent filmmakers elevate farm animals to fully-fledged main characters. The film picked up an Oscar nomination for best international film.