The Campbell River Festival of Film’s winter season is kicking off on Jan. 24, beginning with “Eo.”
Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s gripping new drama, which shared the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes competition, follows a sentient donkey as it experiences the best and worst mankind has to offer.
Told through a series of visually striking vignettes and accompanied by a sweeping score, the film’s anchor is the anthropomorphic eyes of a donkey that senses its way through the wheels of fortune.
These include helpless indenturement inside a travelling circus under the care of wide-eyed Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), heading full speed for a glue factory on Mateo’s (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) 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). We are only left to guess what Eo — after seeing the best and worst of humanity — would think.
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. EO, a loving homage to Robert Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar, is a beautifully photographed, fable-like journey through contemporary Europe that asks us to live our lives with the same humility and dignity as our animals do.
“[Skolimowski] eschews a conventional plot to make something that sits between fiction and non-fiction, nature documentary and avant-garde mood piece. If there’s any message behind EO, it’s that animals — donkeys especially — are still treated with plenty of brutality, whereas they are what manage to make our world such a beautiful place […] If there are some movies that play better on a big screen in a dark theatre with the sound turned up, this is one of them,” the Hollywood Reporter’s review of the film says.
The Festival of Films is the result of a successful partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival Film Circuit and the Tidemark Theatre. This partnership allows the Campbell River group to book films that would not normally make their way to our Campbell River movie theatres and show them in the Tidemark Theatre.
Tickets: $15 Admission (+applicable taxes and fees)
Tickets and season passes are available at tidemarktheatre.com OR 250.287.PINK!
RELATED: Campbell River Festival of Films winter lineup released
marc.kitteringham@campbellrivermirror.com
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