Edmond Was a Donkey 2012

Edmond moves through his days with a quiet sense of routine, his work life feeling colorless and his marriage lacking warmth. One day at the office, Edmond’s first colleague Patrick Bouchitey and the others pull a prank that changes everything: they slip a pair of onion-printed donkey ears onto his head. When he glances at himself in a mirror, he is stunned to find a full-grown donkey looking back at him rather than the man he knows. The moment the ears are removed, he feels suddenly “incomplete,” as if the transformation didn’t truly vanish. Yet he makes a stark choice: he decides to keep wearing the donkey ears, letting the myth of madness grow in the eyes of his coworkers and himself.

His wife, Bérangère Bonvoisin as Edmond’s Wife, initially treats the situation as a quirky, temporary joke, brushing off the strange change with a shrug. As the days pass, the line between joke and reality blurs. Edmond’s fixation deepens, and the idea of a fixed, tailor-made headpiece begins to loom. A tailor-made set of donkey ears—crafted from textiles and secured with a strap under the chin—arrives, turning a whispered oddity into a tangible, wearing belief.

Seeking company among other donkeys, Edmond breaks into a zoo’s donkey enclosure at night in a desperate bid for belonging. The following morning, he is caught and confined in a mental health facility. There, electroconvulsive therapy is administered, and the medical staff insist that he is not a donkey. The treatment appears to work, and Edmond seems to be free of the ears, free of the illusion, and free of the need to hide behind the disguise.

His former superior, Benoît Brione as Edmond’s Boss, who has always admired Edmond’s dedication and efficiency, speaks up for him and fights to restore him to his previous position at work. Yet the fragile peace evaporates quickly.

On the way to work, at a subway station, a relapse strikes. Edmond is haunted by a fellow inpatient from earlier who believed he was a chicken; the hallucination unfurls wings and seems to take flight. In the crowded underground, the noise intensifies—the crowds, dubbed with the sound of running horses, stampede Edmond. He returns to his archival post at the office, alone among the dusty files, where he hastily crafts a new pair of paper donkey ears and places them back on his head. They bring him a fragile sense of relief, a reprieve from alienation that he cannot find among others whom he calls the “horses.”

Knowing he will never be accepted as a donkey by the crowd, he makes a final, devastating choice and dies by being crushed between two motorized shelves. The scene lingers, and the film closes on a stark, hopeful note: a donkey standing peacefully in a wild meadow, serene and free.

Edmond’s world is one of quiet desperation, sharp reversals, and a stubborn insistence on wearing a solitary identity that others refuse to recognize. The story traces how longing for connection can bend perception, how a routine life can fracture under the weight of others’ disbelief, and how the idea of belonging can become a fragile refuge—one that, in the end, only a wild, open field can truly hold.