Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A glimpse into the raw and simple power of nature through encounters with farm animals: the eponymous Gunda, a mother pig; two cows, and a one-legged chicken.
Gunda is a singular documentary experience: shot in luminous black-and-white with no narration, no dialogue, and no music, it observes farm animals — particularly a mother pig — with extraordinary patience and intimacy. The cinematography by Egil Håskjold Larsen is genuinely exceptional, achieving a meditative, almost Bressonian beauty. The 'acting' of the animals, particularly Gunda herself, is astonishingly expressive and emotionally devastating. The film's conception is wholly distinctive — it belongs to no conventional documentary tradition and demands a different kind of attention from the viewer. The ending, in which Gunda searches desperately for her removed piglets, is one of the most quietly harrowing sequences in recent cinema. Plot scores lower simply because there is minimal narrative structure by design — the film resists story almost entirely, which is part of its radical novelty but limits its rating in that category.