The Beauty of the Donkey / Bukuria e Gomarit (Dea Gjinovci, 2025)

Scottish premiere

Wheelchair accessible* | In Albanian, French and English; with English and descriptive subtitles
Pay-what-you-can tickets (£4 / £7 / £10)

If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.

In 1968, Asllan, a 19-year-old Kosovar political activist, was forced into exile, taking him away from his native Makermal. More than 50 years later, his daughter Dea, visits the village and, as her father shares stories from his childhood, embarks on a quest to revive these memories of a suspended past through staging Asllan’s them in a village that is no more, together with locals who have had to rebuild their lives and homes. The journey to explore this painful past leads Dea to also search for the answers as to what happened to her grandmother, whom she never met, who disappeared as the family were fleeing the war.

Both heartfelt and heartbreaking, The Beauty of the Donkey explores relationships between parents and children: the passing down of love, stories, and trauma. In the context of this year’s Special Strand, engaging with memory through the archive, it asks: what happens when we cannot rely on archival material; when memories and oral histories are all we have?

Content notes: grief, war, intergenerational trauma, brief reenactment of violence, discussion of violence (including ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence)

Curated by Dylan Beck

* Please note, The Lower Hall at the Pyramid at Anderston is wheelchair accessible through a ramp at a side entrance. There are 9 steps between the level where it is located and the rest of the venue, meaning that to make way to the accessible toilet or other parts of the building, wheelchair users will need to re-enter via the main entrance. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.