Returning to a homeland that no longer exists: Dea Gjinovci’s “The Beauty of the Donkey” at the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film8 min read
In The Beauty of the Donkey (2025), presented at the 2026 goEast festival, Dea Gjinovci accompanies her father, Asllan, to the Kosovar village of his childhood, more than fifty years after his forced departure. This filial relationship is central to the film: Gjinovci is not filming exile from a distance, but from within her own family history. Through this intimate journey, she crafts a hybrid work, somewhere between family documentary, theatrical reconstruction and political meditation on migration, memory and the wounds passed down from one generation to the next.
An impossible return
The Beauty of the Donkey begins as a return to one’s roots. Dea Gjinovci, who grew up in Switzerland, travels to Kosovo with her father Asllan, a former Albanian political activist forced into exile in the late 1960s. The journey could have been a simple family quest: to find a house, a village, faces and memories. But the film quickly shows that return is never simple when history has displaced bodies, erased places and turned memories into uncertain territory.
Asllan returns to Makërmal with almost mythologised images of his childhood: the hills, the evening gatherings, the ripe pears, the presence of the donkey in the stable. These fragments are tender, almost luminous. Yet they are not enough to rebuild the past. The real village never fully matches the village preserved in memory. It is precisely in this gap that the film finds its strength.
Dea Gjinovci does not simply film a father returning home. She films a man confronted with what does not return: the dead, the silences, the vanished houses, the broken ties and the compromises imposed by history. Return becomes less a resolution than a confrontation.
A political film told through the intimate
What is striking about The Beauty of the Donkey is the way it allows politics to emerge without ever spelling it out too heavily. The film does not take the form of a historical lecture on Kosovo, Albanian exile or political repression. Instead, it works through fragments: conversations, unease and incomplete memories.
Because the director is also the daughter of the film’s main character, every question carries a double weight. Dea Gjinovci is at once filmmaker and daughter, observer and heir. Her camera does not simply record Asllan’s memories; it tests the space between his past and her own understanding of it. The result is a film shaped by love, curiosity and distance – the distance between generations, between Kosovo and Switzerland, and between lived experience and inherited memory.
Asllan’s journey reminds us that major historical ruptures are not only lived through archives or history books. They are inscribed in families, bodies, languages, and in the ways a past is – or is not – passed on to children. By accompanying her father, Gjinovci also questions her own place: what does it mean to inherit a country one knows mostly through family stories? What remains of a homeland when it has long been narrated more than lived?
The Swiss dimension is central here. The Beauty of the Donkey is also a film about migration and about the lives built elsewhere after political rupture. Switzerland is not simply the place from which Gjinovci returns to Kosovo; it is part of the story itself – a space of refuge, reconstruction and distance. For many Kosovar Albanians, migration to Switzerland was not only an economic trajectory, but also a response to political pressure, insecurity and the narrowing of possibilities at home. The film captures this diasporic condition with subtlety: the homeland is both close and far away, emotionally present but physically transformed, inherited through language, family memory and silence.
The film is particularly strong in showing that exile is not only a geographical separation. It is also a fracture in time. Asllan did not simply leave a place; he was cut off from a version of himself, from his youth, and from a social and political world that no longer exists. In this sense, The Beauty of the Donkey speaks about Kosovo, but also about all stories of exile in which return reveals that the country left behind and the country found again can never be identical.
Memory, theatre and truth
The film’s hybrid form plays an essential role. Dea Gjinovci blends documentary observation with staged moments, particularly through the use of re-enactments. This choice could have seemed artificial. Instead, it works remarkably well, because it corresponds to the very subject of the film. Memory is never a neutral recording. It reconstructs, selects, embellishes and distorts. By embracing staging, Gjinovci does not betray the truth: she shows that every attempt to recover the past already involves a form of representation.
The re-enacted scenes sometimes give the film an almost theatrical quality, as if the village had become a stage on which family and collective ghosts could return. This theatricality does not distance us from reality; on the contrary, it allows the film to approach what a purely observational documentary might not be able to capture: the emotional texture of a memory, the violence of an absence, and the confusion between what was lived, told and imagined.
A family story, a collective wound
One of the film’s great strengths is its refusal to draw a clear line between personal history and collective history. The relationship between Dea and Asllan forms the emotional heart of the story, but it constantly opens onto broader questions: political exile, the memory of war, communal wounds and intergenerational transmission.
The Beauty of the Donkey is not only a film about a father and daughter. It is also a film about a society marked by absence – an absence that, in Kosovo, has a very concrete historical dimension.
This dimension resonates with the broader post-war context of Kosovo, where the question of missing persons remains one of the most painful legacies of the conflict. According to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), between 4,400 and 4,500 people were estimated to be missing at the end of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, and around 1,700 remain unaccounted for today. Since 1999, ICMP has supported efforts to identify the missing, including through DNA-based work. In that sense, the absences evoked in The Beauty of the Donkey are not only metaphorical or familial: they are part of a still-unfinished process of truth, identification and mourning.
This is where the film becomes deeply social. It shows how a community lives with what it has not fully expressed. How family stories can protect, but also confine. How the past can be both a refuge and a burden. Those who have disappeared, been displaced or remained unspoken continue to occupy space. They are there in conversations, in looks and in silences.
Tenderness as method
Despite the gravity of its themes, The Beauty of the Donkey is never a heavy film. There is great tenderness in Dea Gjinovci’s gaze, especially towards her father. This tenderness does not erase the tensions; it allows them to be observed without unnecessary brutality.
Asllan appears in turn as a witness, a storyteller, a wounded man, and sometimes someone trapped inside his own memories. The director never reduces him to a symbolic figure of exile. She allows him his humour, his hesitations and his contradictions. That is what makes the film so human.
The title itself, The Beauty of the Donkey, says something about this approach. There is something modest, almost anti-spectacular, in the figure of the donkey. In contrast to grand heroic narratives, the film pays attention to details: an animal in a stable, a house rebuilt through memory, a fruit, a voice, a sentence. Through these simple elements, history becomes tangible again.
A return without closure
Seen at the goEast festival, The Beauty of the Donkey fits perfectly into a programme attentive to the memories of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The film does not try to explain everything about Kosovo, and perhaps that is what makes it so accurate. It does not turn the country into a mere backdrop for war or trauma. It presents it as a space of life, memory, contradictions and impossible returns.
The film resonates strongly through its ability to connect an individual trajectory with political history, while also speaking to broader experiences of migration, diaspora and return. It reminds us that post-conflict societies cannot be understood only through agreements, borders or institutions, but also through intimate stories, family inheritances and transmitted silences.
The Beauty of the Donkey is a discreet but deeply affecting film. It tells the story of a father and daughter, but also of the way history enters families and continues to shape subsequent generations. By filming her own father’s return to Kosovo, Dea Gjinovci transforms a personal journey into a wider reflection on exile, migration and collective memory. Through this return, she offers a sensitive and political work, in which memory appears in all its fragility: painful, incomplete, but necessary.
The Beauty of the Donkey (2025) was screened as part of the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.
