Do Donkeys Act?

Well, do they? To ask is also to answer, especially when the question is posed as an ethnographic poem in which the donkey is the centre of interest. Restoring the rightful dignity of an animal long ridiculed and forced to toil as beasts of burden, Do Donkeys Act? invites us to abandon our anthropocentric viewpoint and think about the mysteries of the animal's behaviour and communication, expressed here noisily and opaquely. Filmed over the course of five years in several sanctuaries for abused donkeys, the film juxtaposes astonishingly poetic images of the stoic beasts with narration by Willem Dafoe, who's only a supporting player here: the real actor is indeed the donkey, the ultimate performance artist in this cheeky experimental film.