NMR by Cristian Mungiu is a performance in itself: evoking major European issues from a small village in Transylvania, where Cristian Mungiu comes from. Matthias, who had left to work in Germany, returns home, where no one is waiting for him, certainly not the mother of his son, nor his ex-mistress, and he is looking for his place.
In these mountains where we speak Romanian, Hungarian, still a little German, where the Roma are banally ostracized, the low level of wages pushes them to economic exile and to recruit, the local industrial bakery recruits Sri Lankans , very current nonsense. Mentalities change more slowly than real life and xenophobia against workers from Asia sets the village ablaze. Key scene of the film: a meeting of the inhabitants to decide the fate of the Sri Lankans, sequence shot of 17 minutes.
EO, in Polish, is the onomatopoeia that is translated in France by Hi Han. It is therefore the story of a donkey, a little gray donkey, which we follow for 80 minutes, on a journey that will take him from a circus to Poland, where he is happy – but will be paradoxically freed by from animalists – to a more disastrous fate in Italy, passing through farms, clandestine breeding, highways or even a football match in which the poor equine will make a hell of a mess in spite of himself. Throughout his journey, he will come across mostly wicked or cynical humans.
A pro-nature and pro-animal film assumed by its director. EO is superbly realized and lit, images of night under the glow of circus lanterns or highway spotlights, from the countryside to the rivers, interspersed with dreamlike and psychedelic scenes that take us inside the head of the animal protagonist, and in which we find a lot of the sense of the image of Skolimowski, who is also a painter in life, all that makes it a very beautiful film.