A Day in the Farm Life: ‘Gunda’ Documentary Review

April 13, 2021

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Gunda (CREDIT: NEON)

Starring: Pigs, Chickens, Cows, Bulls

Director: Viktor Kossakovsky

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: G

Release Date: April 16, 2021 (Select Theaters)

I first stumbled upon Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky’s work a few years ago when I saw Aquarela, which was just an hour and a half of H2O doing what it does. Now his subject matter is fully alive (instead of life-sustaining), as he takes us to the farm in Gunda. Shot in stunning black-and-white cinematography, this is a meditative document of swine, poultry, and bovines going about their day. There’s no on-screen human presence in any capacity, but this isn’t strictly cinema verite. As straightforward as the presentation is, you can sense the pulse of mediation. Watching Gunda isn’t the same as visiting a farm. It may be simple and no-frills, but I don’t think anyone else quite has the capacity to make it the way that Kossakovsky did.

Fair warning: if you’re going to watch Gunda, you absolutely have to be comfortable with maximum levels of snorting. The biggest star of the show is a momma pig who spends a significant portion of the runtime suckling her piglets, and simply put, she makes the sounds that pigs make, and she’s not ashamed to do so. That’s the general vibe of this entire film. Farm animals typically aren’t ashamed to be themselves, but that seems especially true here. While watching, I felt like I was stumbling upon personal moments that I wouldn’t have otherwise have had access to. Or maybe I’m just noticing things that I’ve never noticed before because presenting it all in a feature format forces me to pay attention. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen cows and bulls whipping their tails against each other, for example, but that’s what they’re doing here.

Overall, there’s a bit of unexplainable magic at play in Gunda that makes it all so very compelling. I could do my best to break down how Kossakovsky managed to pull off such stunning cinematography, or take inventory in quotidian terms of everything that the animals get up to over the course of 93 minutes. But I don’t know why a pig walking around in the grass managed to transport me as much as it did. And yet somehow it did, and I’ve gotta respect her for that.

Gunda is Recommended If You Like: A day at the farm minus all the smells

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Snouts

The Wettest Documentary Review Ever: ‘Aquarela’

August 15, 2019

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CREDIT: Stine Heilmann/Sony Pictures Classics

Starring: H2O

Director: Victor Kossakovsky

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Rating: PG for General Aquatic Danger

Release Date: August 16, 2019 (Limited)

Water. Water water water water water water water.

That’s what’s promised and it’s certainly what’s on display in Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s wet, unique, and uniquely wet documentary Aquarela. Water sustains all life on this planet, so in a way, it also sustains all cinema. But when it stands on its own at number one on the call sheet, does it hit the spot? To be fair, I will have to personally assess a score of “incomplete” on that question, as will most people who end up seeing Aquarela. It was shot at a practically unheard rate of 96 frames per second, four times the standard 24, and there aren’t many theaters with the capacity to project at that rate. So it will be screened at 48 frames per second, which is itself quite rare.

The idea here is to show a montage of H2O in its most overpowering forms (huge waves, flood waters, glaciers cracking apart) and remind humans that we’re at the mercy of the all-consuming forces of nature. On a technical level, Kossakovsky’s accomplishment is unimpeachable. But in terms of the content he’s chosen to include, it all feels so haphazard: here’s a car crashing below ice here, here are some animals stuck in floodwater there, here we go to a close-up of a waterfall.

The king of documentaries that offer a survey of the non-living world in images is the 1982 time-lapse classic Koyaanisqatsi, and Aquarela does not come close to being the hypnotic achievement that Godfrey Reggio gave us. Instead, we start off with a sort of rake joke-style comedy of errors on ice and then somehow make our way to a nameless series of crashing waves. In other words, Kossakovsky hasn’t discovered anything new about water by making it the star of the show, but surrender to the experience, and maybe it can lull you in the right way.

Aquarela is Recommended If You Like: Staring at the ocean all day

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Floods