Experiential in both subject and form, Viktor Kossakovsky‘s intimate documentary Gunda, chronicles the lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens (one of which is one-legged), and a herd of cows.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1961, Kossakovsky has been making original documentaries for the past three decades. In 2011, his Long Live the Antipodes! served as the opening film of the Venice Film Festival. He is perhaps best known in the US for his 2018 documentary, Aquarela, a mediation on the natural wonder of water (released by Sony Picture Classics).

Using stark black and white cinematography, lacking any dialogue, and mostly relying on the farm’s ambient soundtrack, in Gunda the director records the everyday life of his subjects with remarkable patience and attention to detail. In order to pull viewers into a rarely observed world, Kossakovsky also avoids color, music, and fast editing. Gunda asks viewers to engage in something unusual, to think about animals’ mysterious consciousness, to contemplate the feelings they may have, and how they express them in different contexts?

Neon acquired U.S. distribution rights to this American-Norwegian documentary, which premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival and then played at the New York Film Festival in September. Joaquin Phoenix, a two-time Golden Globe winner (Walk the Line, 2006; Joker, 2020), serves as executive producer. An animal rights advocate and a member of In Defense of Animals and PETA, the actor doesn’t wear any clothes made out of animal skin; in his films, leather costumes are made from synthetic materials. In 2019, for his lifelong dedication to animal rights, he was named PETA’s Person of the Year.

Shot in Norway, Spain, and the UK, sites where animals are freer to roam than in the US, Gunda centers on its eponymous sow and her litter, which is first seen glistening from the womb of their mother as she lies grunting. Gunda is observed, usually through shots taken at ground level, rooting in the dirt, wallowing, and pushing along the growing piglets with her snout, letting them scramble for her teats.

Through his unsentimental strategy and sharp observation, Kossakovsky insists that animals be recognized for their idiosyncratic nature. Thus, roosters set down their feet at their own pace, and cows confront troublesome flies by standing side by side, head to rear, ready to switch each other’s faces with their tails.

Meantime Gunda the pig’s emotions appear to be as real as those of human beings and they persist or change from one situation to the next, even if we humans don’t readily understand them. The cameras follow her around the deserted yard. At one point, Gunda ignores her maternal instincts by stepping forward and crushing a newborn under her trotter.

Kossakovsky’s deeply observed look at the everyday rhythms of farm life is marked by precision and purpose. The animals aren’t spooked by the constant presence of cameras roving for extreme close-ups, a style that results in extremely atmospheric interior sequences., Kossakovsky and director of cinematography Egil Håskjold Larsen render these presumably familiar creatures in a way that makes them appear alien. The cameras don’t hesitate to show the imperfections and the haggard, awkward structures of their bodies, but the documentary reveals these pigs to be imbued with their own chaotic personality and impulses. Gunda’s litter aren’t pink and cuddly, as expected, but rather greedy, violent underlings that are fighting their way to her teats, almost crushing each other in their efforts to edge out their siblings.

There’s a mesmerizing sequence of a one-legged rooster and hay trampled underfoot, with a light sound of a spur on the ground. Other sequences depict the animals’ grumbling movements, expressing their ever-changing moods. Sound designer and editor Alexander Dudarev has recorded the particular sounds of these animals in a way that gives them a definite character. Paired with bracing low-angle shots, the sound design is made up of incongruent torrents of voices that are high pitched in some scenes, while low-pitched in others

The film’s approach doesn’t necessarily provide a pleasant view, or a melodic tune, or a clever talk, but it is instrumental in allowing the animals to behave naturally, as they feel at the moment. Here is a feature in which pigs are not forced to behave “nicely” or “cutely” for human mass entertainment, as they have been in numerous popular movies, such as the 1995 Babe (and its sequels and imitations).

It’s in its specific juxtapositions of images and sounds that the film earns its cumulative power and exerts its particular charm. Impressively crafted, Gunda observes farm animals in real life in such a novel and expansive mode that it may change the way we relate to them on-screen and off.