This quiet and strangely beautiful short documentary is nominated for a 2026 Academy Award. The film maker has done this before, or something like it. In her 2017 feature length documentary Cielo, which was also shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, her cameras follow the simple, sauntering gait of the donkeys to allow audiences to take in vast mountainous terrains by day and by night the marvels of the Milky Way filling the Atacama Desert sky.
She is aware that light pollution that keeps most people from seeing starlit galaxies at night, recalled the first time she saw the cosmic movements in the Atacama Desert nighttime sky.
This time around we follow the donkey trio, where they come upon a building--no people, no vehicles, just the building. Her cameras did interior shots at the Paranal Observatory run by a consortium of European astronomers at around 2,635 meters above sea level. The whole experience of watching these eerily calm animals saunter in and around the observatory, never seeing anything--no food, no water, where do they get sustenance? It left me with more questions than answers, but also at peace.
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