The Beauty of the Donkey La Beauté de l'Âne

Award-winning Swiss Albanian filmmaker Dea Gjinovci (2020’s Wake Up on Mars) returns to the bucolic Kosovo town of her father’s youth—a place he hasn’t seen in 60 years—for this lyrical journey into the past at once wistful and tragic. Together, they recreate his childhood memories, making sets that resemble his former home and with scenes acted out by the local villagers. Through this collective creative project, 1950s Kosovo springs to life in a series of beautifully realized vignettes that prompt Gjinovci’s father to reflect on times of innocence, of violence (when the country persecuted the Albanian population), and of loss, enabling him to finally reckon with the disappearance of his mother decades before.

This evocative mix of memory and reenactment allows father and daughter to uncover shocking truths about their family history and to come to terms with a legacy of oppression. A touching narrative of resilience and catharsis, The Beauty of the Donkey is also a sensitive and bittersweet testament to the power of stories to bring back people and places that history and political strife have tried to erase.