Donkey Days

Having strong-willed, carelessly manipulative Ines (Hildegard Schmahl) for a mother has driven adult sisters Anna (Jil Krammer) and Charlotte (Susanne Wolff) further apart, not closer together. Anna feels judged and unloved for being overweight, to the point of alienating her girlfriend by sulking through a night of lesbian performance art, while Charlotte is polished, cold, brittle. Festering wounds come to a head when Ines throws them one final curveball—it has to do with the film’s title, the meaning of which Dutch director Rosanne Pel is confident enough to hold back until a late, bizarre reveal. Shot in Hamburg with a German cast, the film’s cinematography, with Dogme 95–esque handheld camera and delicately pictorial 16mm, is a hint that Donkey Days will have the subtle savagery of Thomas Vinterberg’s unhappy-family sagas, and the cutting barbs, tending inexorably to farce, of Kristoffer Borgli’s post-politeness domestic satires. Unresolved surrealist flourishes itch at the edges of a narrative that tightens or slackens with the unpredictable tension of a family dinner—in fact, the daughters’ issues around food are at the heart of the movie, and Pel films meals with an uncomfortable intimacy, shooting haute cuisine and improvised snacks alike with a queasy eye evocative of burgeoning adolescent neurosis. It’s one of many touches in Donkey Days, Pel’s follow-up to her award-winning 2018 debut Light as Feathers, that reveal her as a visceral, instinctive sketch artist.

This program is supported by DutchCultureUSA, a program of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the United States.