Our Daily Bread
New film exploring how the food we eat is produced
Nikolaus Geyrhalter's new film Our Daily Bread is a documentary that explores how the food we eat is prepared for us in unseen factories, farms, conveyer belts and introduces us to the people that prepare it for us.
The film has been received favourably around the world and below are two excerpts from reviews in the New York Times and the New York Sun.
You can download an interview with the director and visit the film's website to see clips, downloads and find out more at http://ourdailybread.at
Review in the New York Sun
Arts and Letters: A World's Worth of Trouble on the Screen
BY NICOLAS RAPOLD, October 6, 2006
Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread, a documentary exploring how the food we eat is harvested, slaughtered, quartered, and packaged teleports us to an efficiently whirring future of conveyor belts, robotic knives, and tarpedover countryside. But the future is, as they say, now: Mr. Geyrhalter's stunning documentary is a near wordless tour of hypermodern farms and slaughterhouses that feed Europe. The director once journeyed into Chernobyl's postmeltdown badlands and ghost towns to see who or what was living there (Pripyat, a 1999 festival selection), and here he brings us just as unreal a reality, a clockwork chronicle that confronts us with the terrible beauty of our modernized civilization.
You'll learn that thousands of chicks can be poured and diverted on those conveyor belts like a peeping river, that the gutting of cows can be automated, and, rather more comically, how olive trees are harvested. Mr. Geyrhalter's measured takes avoid polemic, framing his material with neatly squared-off compositions and using tracking shots reminiscent of the machines on view that render jump-suited workers just another kind of sprocket.
Our Daily Bread isn't meant to scare the squeamish with a Franco-German Fast Food Nation — these places are far too clean for that (though there is some blood and guts). The film instead moves us along from fascination, to a kind of spectatorial automation, and finally to a visceral but almost existential feeling of numbness. This soulless world of pure function lays bare the industry behind reality, take it or leave it, and though everything works perfectly, it's still a film that makes you hope karma doesn't exist.
Review in the New York Times
October 6, 2006: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
At the New York Film Festival, a Global Glimpse of the State of the Cinema By MANOHLA DARGIS
Mr. Geyrhalter’s documentary creeps into your system with more stealth. Like some of the best films at this year’s festival, Our Daily Bread sheds light on an otherwise secret world. Mr. Geyrhalter, manningthe high-definition video camera himself, casts an unblinking, nominally disinterested eye on industrial food production, from peppers grown and chemically doused in enormous sealed warehouses to baby chicks hatched on trays by the thousands, then hurtled live and peeping en masse onto conveyer belts as if they were widgets, before ending up, after a growth spurt, on hooks. The barbarism of such factory farming as well as its costs on workers and animals alike — and on the consumers whose appetites make them complicit in this horror — is devastating.
More Details
For more information visit http://ourdailybread.at
last updated: 11-03-2008 13:33