Eye For Film >> Movies >> Menged (2006) Film Review
Menged
Reviewed by: Angus Wolfe Murray
A man and his son take a little donkey to market. The journey is long.
At first, the boy rides the donkey and then the man, who is so big his feet almost touch the ground, and then they both ride the donkey. Finally the donkey refuses to go on any more and the man beats it. Two Italian ladies in a car, with Aid The World written on the side, stop and tell the man that rather than hitting the poor creature, he should carry it.
This is Ethiopia and the landscape looks so like England that you expect to come across a game of cricket on the village green at any moment. Instead, the man thinks about what the smart white ladies have said and runs the last stretch to market with the little donkey on his shoulders.
The film is so simple, it has charm and a nagging suspicion that an animal was harmed in the making of it.
Reviewed on: 18 Aug 2007