Gunda review: This portrait of farm life becomes a stealth porcine soap opera

What’s so remarkable about the film is not only how beautifully it renders its humble surroundings, but how much drama it manages to excavate from the daily toing and froing of farmyard life

Dir: Viktor Kossakovsky. Cert PG, 93 mins

Gunda begins with a pig – just an ordinary pig, its proud snout stuck halfway out of its weather-worn hutch. Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky has chosen to capture his experimental, non-narrative portrait of farm life in crisp, high-contrast black and white. It allows for an exquisite burst of texture, from the sharp splinters jutting out of the wood grain, to the coarse but airy tufts of hair that gather at the pig’s ears.

But to label Gunda as a purely non-narrative feature feels misleading, even if it’s totally bereft of voiceovers or explanatory title cards. There is a rising tension in the film’s first few minutes, as viewers are left to solve the mystery of what’s twitching at the back of the pig’s hutch, in its deepest dark. Suddenly, a piglet bursts forth – we are, in fact, silent witnesses to a birth. Soon enough, Alexander Dudarev’s intricately designed soundscape descends into a clangour of squeals as these new creatures – wobbling, shivering, overwhelmed by the newness of life – rush to their mother’s teat.