We share our planet with more than a billion pigs, more than a billion cows and over 20 billion chickens. In industrialized societies, we are oblivious to or ignore them as the sentient beings they are. What do they think about us? What would they say to us if we knew their language? Can we understand them by opening up and observing them carefully? What can they teach us?
In Gunda, Russian auteur Victor Kossakovsky offers a moving intervention to recalibrate our moral universe by showing us their individuality. A pig named Gunda, two ingenious cows and a scene-stealing one-legged chicken remind us of the value of life for each of our fellow creatures.
Returning the sow's holding gaze and listening to the cow's gentle lowing, Kossakovsky debunks any pretension that we are separated from them by a uniquely human capacity for emotion, consciousness or will.
Immersed in their lives, lived to the full in joy and pain, just like ours, it becomes inconceivable for humankind not to swiftly undertake the major changes necessary to end mass cruelty and slaughter.
Gunda is Kossakovsky’s deeply personal attempt to renew our vision of life, a meditation on the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.
