Gunda, a female warrior  

Gunda is the name of a sow who lives on a Norwegian farm together with her newborn piglets and their domestic animal neighbors: a family of chickens and a family of cows. She is also the leading role in the Berlin-based, Russia-born filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky’s multi-awarded documentary named after her. In this 93-minute, black-white, no music, no text, no voice-over, in short, no human in sight film, the camera literally follows Gunda’s seemingly eventless everyday life, positioning itself almost all the time at the same level as the sow so that as viewers, we get to see the world from her point of view. This occasionally dizzying viewing experience reminds us, for once, that we are not in a position of dominance on this planet.

The film starts with mother Gunda lying at the entrance of her pigpen while the new-born piglets climb, jump and attempt to balance around her magnificent body. The camera then switches to the interior of the pigpen, showing the piglets, happily and busily, suckling from their mum. As a human viewer, I feel myself being mesmerized by the alluring chant of suckling, licking, squealing, grunting and snorting, the sound that can only come from living creatures in close body contact. I would never have imagined that watching piglets suckling could bring such meditative comfort.

Kossakovsky also introduced a one-legged chicken and a herd of cattle to us in the film as important characters; both animals are important providers for our diet: proteins. His film is a demonstration of why humans do not own this planet alone, but we share it with billions of other animals. But Kossakovsky doesn’t insert the idea with stereotypical images of animal slaughter, produced by animal protection organizations, or peep into the secret pairing ritual of exotic animals like many science and education documentaries are keen on doing; instead, he allows his camera to be the spokesman for the animals, and his camera does not lie.

From the pig’s vantage point, we are invited to view Gunda’s desperate search for the last missing piglet, only to witness how she crushes the malformed little one in front of the camera. Animals are complicated beings. In recent years, many scientists studying animal behaviors have found increasing evidence suggest that animals, like humans, have certain moral codes of conduct, emotional expressions, just that their conducts and expressions are different from ours. Or are they? Look at the wordless communication between the piglets and the mum, the cute small kiddos climbing up and falling down on mum’s majestic body. When I watch Gunda stands up as if shaking off a few naughty piglets, gives a meaningful glance to some others, then pushes a piglet tenderly with her snout, I can almost feel the maternal love, not in any degree differs from mother-children love in human expression that transmits from the film screen and spreads all over the movie theater. Kossakovsky’s well-studied camera movements beautifully capture such euphoric moments. Behind his camera lens, we can also feel the same kind of love that he gives to his subjects.

Viktor Kossakovsky, who calls himself “(probably) the first vegetarian kid in the Soviet Union” , after his best friend, a piglet named Vasya, was killed and served as pork cutlets for a New Year’s Eve dinner. He was then 4 years old. As he grew up and became a film director, he has always carried the idea of making a film that would visualize his compassion for animals. But he didn’t want to make a film for vegan propaganda , or for personalized animal characters like Babe. He wanted to make a film about animals as living, feeling beings in their own right. It took him nearly three decades to finally meet Norwegian producer Anita Rehoff Larsen from Sant & Usant who took the risk of making it. The film was made in the Norwegian countryside and Gunda was the pig that the film crew found on the very first day of their research trip. The name Gunda is the Norwegian short form for the German name Kunigunda, which means “female warrior”.

But even a female warrior cannot protect her children from being taken away from her to fill in the demands of the carnivorous food industry: a pig’s destiny. Perhaps this is where the film’s moral sense comes to a paradoxical dead end, but Kossakovsky certainly doesn’t just stop here. If we view the circle of life through the lens of Darwinism, human beings stand on top of the food chain not because we are the top predators, but because human beings learned to use tools and thus could develop new technologies for hunting down large animals, taming small animals, as well as using them for farming and agriculture. Even if humans were once the top predators who primarily relied on meat, it does not mean that modern humans should consume more animal meat for the sake of obtaining even more nutrition. Instead, the development of modern agriculture offers diversified alternatives. In other words, we can do better for a sustainable and eco-friendly food industry. Some facts from the large-scale modern meat industry are shocking; for example, in order to improve the reproductive utilization rate of sows, the weaning time for animals have been continuously shortened, from the traditional 2 months to the current 2 weeks even. The question we should ask ourselves is: do we have to do so?

The last 10-minute of Gunda is one of the most heart-breaking and tear-filled scenes I have seen on film screens for quite a long time. With the arrival of a monstrous truck, the bustle chattering of the piglets gradually fade out. The truck drives away and finally vanishes into the misty distance. After a quiet pause, from the dark shadow of the pigpen gate, Gunda emerges. For the first time in the film, we see Gunda swiftly moves her gigantic body, trotting as she never has done before. From time to time, she raises up her head and ears, listening intensively as if trying to distinguish her children’s crying from the buzzing environment. Birds are chirping, bugs are humming, all are peaceful on the farm except for in the heart of Gunda, a sea of sorrow is trembling.

Gunda is a film that reveals sentience and emotion within animal species that are often denied further understanding from humans. Next time when you see a trotting pig, please remind yourself, we are more similar than different in our respective lives.