Gunda: Dazzling One-Of-A Kind Documentary Elevates Farm Animals and Filmmaking

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A+

The phrase, “How on Earth did they get that shot?” is one invariably repeated by anyone watching Gunda, a breathtakingly intimate, heartbreakingly real, music- and narrator-free documentary about farm animals shot in black and white from the animals’ perspective.

Alongside director of photography Egil Håskjold Larsen, Russian-born documentarian Victor Kossakovsky puts viewers in the haystack as Gunda, a mama pig, gives birth to a litter as she lays prostrate in the opening of a barn, her body obscured but her head sticking out.

We know the births just happened because we can still see the embryonic fluid slicking the tiny piglets as they compete to find their suckling spot along their mama’s body.

Later, during a rainstorm, we see teenage pigs playfully lifting their snouts towards the drops to catch the water. There’s a one-legged chicken surveying a field. Cows stand nose to tail, purposefully swatting flies off each other with their tails. Viewers follow these “characters” from deep within their midst as they spend their days.

As Larsen explained to Variety, the Gunda crew spent three months on a farm, often sleeping in the grass to be able to use the morning light as the pigs, cows, and chickens stirred, filming again at sunset, and breaking during the hot midday. Using “classical backlit beauty shots,” they captured porcine eyelashes and ears gorgeously illuminated by the sun as well as swaying trees and blades of grass.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Larsen claims the experience of making the film changed him. No doubt. Gunda is entirely visual storytelling, and it is mesmerizing.

While it’s tempting to subtitle the film The Secret Life of Farm Animals, it’s clear these scenes are ordinary and available to anyone with access to a farm and the ability to slow down and simply watch. We just rarely do… or can.

Apart from its cinematic prowess, the film’s reason for being is demonstrating the animals’ sentience, which it does persuasively and without a single spoken word, just as executive producer and animal rights’ advocate Joaquin Phoenix must have imagined it.

There’s no mistaking the curiosity on the faces of chickens exiting a cage and feeling grass on their feet or the worry and confusion on Gunda’s face as she seeks her babies after they’ve been trucked away. We see exhaustion, joy, annoyance, boredom. We see the animals not as commodities but as beings, and the effect is every bit as riveting as the artful images on screen.

Even those resistant to Gunda’s vegetarian message would be hard-pressed to describe these creatures cavalierly having witnessed these exquisitely framed, highly meditative moments. We see life within these beings, and we witness their undeniable will to live. And it’s beautiful. Gunda is truly one of a kind.

Gunda. Directed by Victor Kossakovsky. Cinematography by Egil Håskjold Larsen. Available in select theatres and on demand July 16.