93 min | G | April 16, 2021 | Neon
Viktor Kossakovsky points his camera at a sow, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, and refuses to say a single word. No narration, no music, no message spelled out. Just animals living, and a filmmaker daring you to keep watching.
Gunda is a mother pig on a farm. The film follows her litter through the piglets’ first weeks of life. There is no narration and no score. Kossakovsky shoots in black and white and lets the animals exist on their own terms. The film is really about attention. It asks whether you can look at a pig long enough to see a person.
Gunda carries the film. She nurses, roots in the mud, and herds her piglets with a patience that reads as labor. The piglets stumble and shove and fight for milk with comic urgency. A herd of cows enters in the middle stretch, and the camera studies their faces and the flies on their backs. A one-legged chicken hops across the yard and surveys it with the wary dignity of a survivor. None of them perform, and that is the point.
Kossakovsky and co-writer Ainara Vera build the film out of patience and proximity. The black-and-white photography strips the postcard prettiness from farm life and forces you to read texture and movement. The sound design replaces music with breath and mud and wind and the wet noise of a nursing litter. The camera stays low at pig height and holds each shot until the animals forget it is there. The final sequence runs long and quiet and turns the absence of language into a gut punch.
Gunda makes its argument without making a speech. It never tells you that these animals have inner lives. It refuses to look away until you conclude that for yourself. The film knows that a pig nosing through straw persuades better than any voiceover about cruelty or consciousness. Kossakovsky trusts the image and the silence to carry the weight. That trust is the whole film.