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GUNDA – A Rare, Intimate Portrait of Animals

by Jennie Richards · Published September 16, 2021 · Updated September 16, 2021

GUNDA is one of those rare, beautiful treasures that dares to show us viewers a first-hand and close-up cinematic glimpse into the lives of individual animals as they experience their own life in a natural setting. The camera and the viewer are right there, on the ground, with a mother pig and her piglets, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows, as life happens in real time. We see how each individual animal processes their world, their individual personalities, and the behaviors characteristic to each animal.

Prepare for a slow-moving, real-time glimpse into the lives of these sentient beings. No words are spoken in the film, there is no dialog, there are only the actions of each animal as they process life. Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography, and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, master Director Victor Kossakovsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, taking in their world with a magical patience and an otherworldly perspective.

GUNDA - A Rare, Intimate Portrait of Animals

We rarely, if ever, get this opportunity to visually see how these animals live in an ideal world—in a setting that is natural for them to exhibit and express their true behaviors, far away from the confinement, cages, and the prisons that we commonly see them in in industrial animal agriculture. These animals seem to relish their lives and their environments, and express a range of emotions and feelings typical of sentient non-human animals – joy, nurturing, curiosity, desire, excitement, pleasure, pain, calm, and wonder.

Jane Goodall once said and the film proves this assertion:

“Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined…they are individuals in their own right.”

As much as the film is enjoyable to watch, there is an underlying message for us. Though the animals in the film live relatively pleasant lives in free-range environments, we see the stark contrast to how 99 percent of farm animals today are violently mistreated and horrifically exploited in industrial farming—the hellish torture chambers and death camps well depicted in previous films like The Ghosts in Our Machine, Earthlings, Speciesism and UNITY. The human use of animals for food is, as the film portrays in the end, inherently brutal, unnatural, and cruel. The film closes with a heart-breaking scene—the truth that animals endure for the humans that eat them.

Remember: An estimated 99% of the animals bred and killed for food in the U.S. today are raised on massive, severely crowded, and highly industrialized farms. They don’t live in environments like the one shown in Gunda. Instead, they’re raised in dark, filthy, cramped, conditions. Although they experience the same emotions as the dogs and cats with whom we lovingly share our homes, animals used for food are routinely confined to battery cages, hutches, or farrowing and gestation crates and forced to live in misery, suffering and brutality. But as Gunda shows us, there’s no such thing as humanely raising animals for food. (PETA)

Filmed in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Film Length: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes

Film Premier: 2020