The Beauty of the Donkey

The Beauty of the Donkey is a lyrical hybrid documentary tracing a daughter’s journey to reconnect with her father’s lost homeland. After sixty years in exile, Asllan returns with his daughter, Dea, to Makermal, the Kosovar village he once called home.

Together they set out to revive his idyllic childhood memories, working with villagers to reconstruct a world erased by war. As playful re-enactments give way to haunting revelations, Dea and Asllan confront the painful disappearance of a beloved matriarch and the collective scars of a community grappling with memory and loss.

The film becomes a moving meditation on the fragile architecture of remembrance, blending cinéma du réel  with elements of magical realism.

Synopsis

In 1968, Asllan, a nineteen-year-old Albanian political activist, was forced into exile, separating him from his native Kosovo for more than fifty years. Despite this forced separation, Asllan keeps the memories of his past alive by telling his children stories about his childhood in the peaceful village of Makermal.

With an innate talent for storytelling, he transports his family into an enchanted world. Inspired by her father’s captivating tales, his daughter Dea decides to revive these memories of a suspended past. She embarks on an emotional journey to bring Asllan back to the village that shaped his identity.

When they return together, Asllan realizes that the village he once knew is no more. The old stone houses have been destroyed by the violence of the 1998 war. The dirt road leading to the village has been replaced by pristine asphalt. Many of the people he grew up with have died or gone into exile, and the cemetery has expanded with several new rows of graves.

Faced with this unsettling reality, Asllan and Dea embark on a bold artistic quest to reimagine and stage Asllan’s stories in the transformed village. The villagers, who also carry memories of that time, join this collective endeavor. Together they revive the customs and stories that shaped the community in the 1950s.

Yet as the stories come to life, a more painful past emerges. For Asllan, this nostalgic reconstruction becomes a way of coping with the tragic loss of his mother during the Kosovo war in 1998. Through this process, he seeks to understand the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, opening a path toward healing and reconciliation.