19/04/2022 - Further details have emerged about the august Polish auteur’s latest, which is set to bow in competition at the French festival next month

Director Jerzy Skolimowski on location for EO

For his first feature in seven years, and his sixth in competition at Cannes (see the news), Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski has returned with EO [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], a contemporary adaptation of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, which famously used the life of a simple donkey as a way to examine human kindness and sin. Skolimowski’s film will retain the figure of the donkey, here named Eo (recalling, of course, Eeyore from AA Milne’s tales), as it passes from owner to owner, “experiencing joy and pain, and feeling the wheels of fate crushing his innocence”, as the official synopsis puts it. Set in Poland and Italy in the present day, EO will have a modern “road movie” feel, bringing together a cast including Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo and, in a role credited as “The Countess”, the mighty Isabelle Huppert. The primary locations of a circus and a slaughterhouse also distinguish it from Bresson’s famously minimalist original, which the director has described as the only film to “really move him”.

EO was co-written by Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska, who was also credited as a scribe on his 2010 Venice prizewinner Essential Killing [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jerzy Skolimowski
film profile]. The movie was produced by Piaskowska and Skolimowski, alongside Eileen Tasca, for Poland’s Skopia Film and Italy’s Alien Films. Eminent British producer Jeremy Thomas, who worked on The Shout with Skolimowski at the beginning of his career, is executive-producing.

The announcement of EO in competition was not widely expected by prognosticators, but the director has form at prior Cannes editions, having won the Grand Prix for The Shout in 1978 and Best Screenplay for 1982’s Moonlighting, which starred a fresh-faced Jeremy Irons. Skolimowski had a near two-decade-long hiatus from filmmaking in Los Angeles, where he focused on painting, before returning to Poland in 2008 to shoot Four Nights with Anna [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. His eclectic list of acting credits includes a very unlikely cameo in Marvel’s first Avengers film, as a KGB colonel interrogating Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. In more timely news, he has co-written the screenplay to The Palace by Roman Polanski, resuming a collaboration that began with Knife in the Water in the early 1960s; the film is currently shooting in Switzerland.