13/10/2025 - Through part-reenactment and part-historical discovery, Dea Gjinovci examines her father’s scars from his exile from Kosovo by returning with him to his hometown

In Switzerland, Albanians are the second-largest ethnic group by descent after Italians, with the most significant wave of migrants having come during the 1990s wars in the Balkans. History ties the Albanian diaspora to their familial place of origin, which, for many, is Kosovo. Swiss-Albanian director Dea Gjinovci is one of these individuals, using the personal experience of herself and her father to take us on a journey of understanding and healing in her newest documentary, The Beauty of the Donkey. The film had its world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival, in the Documentary Competition.

The director’s father, Asllan Gjinovci, left Pristina after being involved in the Yugoslavian student protests in 1968, settling in French-speaking Switzerland. While he never personally experienced the war in Kosovo, his family did, and the reverberations are still felt deeply. Nearly three decades after the end of the conflict, the pair returns to Asllan’s hometown of Makërmal, looking to uncover buried events and engage in a collective reckoning.

Gjinovci notably uses a partly theatrical approach to recreate moments from Asllan’s childhood and the community’s memories of events, asking villagers to take part in this re-enactment performed on a collectively built wooden stage. In one scene filmed at night, mock Serbian soldiers surround sleeping children and families, offering an intentionally distanced recreation of traumatic history. While poetic, this self-reflexive approach ultimately feels more stylistically than emotionally effective, as we lose the concreteness of events, despite its attempt to capture the elusiveness of memory.

Conversely, other storytelling techniques land more fully, such as conversations between the younger members of their family, which grant viewers a window into the past without the need for extensive exposition. Part of Dea and Asllan’s reexamination centres on the disappearance and assumed death of her grandmother, which was shrouded in mystery as his family fled during the war.

The film is at its most intimate and emotional when it deals with history, however painful – especially scenes between Dea and Asllan, where intergenerational loss is palpable, even through the screen. The filmmaker nudges her father to recall – as best he can, in his own time – what remains for him of a place he left so long ago. The two head to the archives, looking for traces of Asllan’s mother, whom he never saw again after he left Kosovo. The gentleness of the camera’s gaze upon the emotional violence to which it bears witness reveals the constant necessity of such types of storytelling.

The Beauty of the Donkey is a production by Astrae Productions (Switzerland), Unseen Film (Kosovo), Haut et Court (France) and Facet (USA). It is sold by First Hand Films.