Episode 19: Gunda with Victor Kossakovsky

In this episode, we feature a conversation with the legendary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky about his recent film GUNDA.

I have been a fan of Kossakovsky’s work since one of his first films, THE BELOVS (1993), which is a portrait of simple village life, sometimes tender and sometimes harsh, captured mostly in a steady observational gaze until the last scene where we are shaken by the filmmaker’s camera work. In Kossakovsky’s latest film, GUNDA, again, Kossakovsky delivers simplicity, tenderness, and a last sequence that makes the ground shake. 

GUNDA is not the masterpiece within Kossakovsky’s body of work but a masterpiece of cinema. Experiential cinema in its purest form, GUNDA chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with intimacy. Using stark, transcendent black-and-white cinematography and the farm's ambient soundtrack, director Victor Kossakovsky invites audiences to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, taking in their world with magical patience and an otherworldly perspective. GUNDA asks us to meditate on the mystery of animal consciousness and reckon with the role humanity plays in it. 

Eka Tsotsoria moderates the conversation, where we reference the contemporary philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton, Story of a Horse by Leo Tolstoy, and Paulus Potter’s painting, The Young Bull.

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR / VICTOR KOSSAKOVSKY

Victor Kossakovsky was born in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad at the time) on July 19, 1961. An innovative documentary filmmaker, his films have been honored with more than 100 awards in national and international festivals. His distinctive filmography spans many different subjects but always explores the interplay of reality and poetic moments.

He began his career in motion pictures at the Leningrad Studio of Documentaries as assistant cameraman, assistant director and editor in 1978. He studied screenwriting and directing at Moscow HCSF and in 1992 made his name with international critics and audiences with his documentary THE BELOVS, which won both the VPRO Joris Ivens Award and the Audience Award at IDFA and dozens of other awards at international festivals around the world. In 2011, Kossakovsky’s ¡VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS! was selected as the opening film of the Venice Film Festival. AQUARELA, his technologically groundbreaking and globe-spanning documentary on the shapes of water also premiered in Venice in 2018 before being shortlisted for the Oscar® for Best Documentary, among other honors.

In many of his films Kossakovsky has served simultaneously as director, editor, cinematographer and writer. Currently based in Berlin, he continues to serve as a teacher and mentor to aspiring filmmakers and documentarians globally.