Our Daily Bread

The documentary shows how food is produced in Europe. No narrator, no music, no interviews. Only images and the sound those places make. Enormous greenhouses, poultry lines, abattoirs, salt mines, nets hauled from the sea. There are people, but they stay small; beside the machinery they look like components. At the break they eat their sandwiches. The film never states a judgement; it simply keeps looking and leaves the viewer alone with their own conclusion. Nikolaus Geyrhalter directs the Austrian documentary; ninety-two minutes, shot in real facilities across several European countries. The camera is always still and symmetrical, each shot composed like a photograph. It became one of the most widely shown films about industrial agriculture.