Gunda
Director: Victor Kossakovsky Run Time: 93 min. Rating: G Release Year: 2021
Starring: Gunda
Country: Norway, United States
Language: English
“A landmark film from a bracingly original filmmaker.”
– Sheri Linden for Hollywood Reporter
About the film:
Official Selection of the Berlinale and New York Film Festival.
Experiential cinema in its purest form, Gunda chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with masterful intimacy. Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, director Victor Kossakowsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, taking in their world with a magical patience and an other worldly perspective, asking us to meditate on the mystery of animal consciousness, and reckon with the role humanity plays in it.
About the filmmaker:
Born in the USSR in 1961, film essayist Victor Kossakovsky has won numerous international awards for his experimental documentary projects. He began his career at the Leningrad Documentary Film Studio and graduated from the Higher Courses for Film Writers and Directors in Moscow. He has taken on the roles of writer, director, editor and cinematographer in many of his films.
His international breakthrough, intimate portrait of a family The Belovs (1992), won Best Documentary and the Audience Award at IDFA in Amsterdam. Sreda (1997) won the One Future Prize at the Munich Film Festival, and ¡Vivan las antípodas! won the True Vision Award at the 2012 True/False Film Festival. In 2018, his immersive meditation on the power of water, Aquarela, premiered at Venice.
Kossakovsky directed, co-wrote and co-edited Gunda, a passion project that took almost three decades to finance. Learn more about his views on respecting nature and filmmaking ethics in an interview by Programmer Rachel Rosen for the New York Film Festival.
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