听 Austrian film-maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter casts an unblinking gaze over the food-processing industry in Europe with this strikingly dispassionate documentary. Shot over a two-year period across unnamed continental locations, Our Daily Bread dispenses with any voice-over or talking-heads interviews. Instead we're compelled to gaze at its procession of carefully composed images and to ponder the origins of the food we so unthinkingly consume on an everyday basis.
Photographed on high-definition video, Our Daily Bread consists of either long, fixed takes or elegant tracking shots. In no particular order, fruit and vegetables are picked, crops sprayed, watered and harvested, baby chicks debeaked, fish gutted, pigs eviscerated, and cows slaughtered. And in the fields and abattoirs, human beings calmly go about their jobs, operating the necessary machinery and pausing for refreshment breaks, where they tuck into their packed food. Frequently the workers appear dwarfed by the vast environments in which they toil, whether it's the men in the salt-mine or the figures in the distance operating the fleet of combine harvesters.
"MAKING YOU LOOK AT REALITY ANEW"
Even in its most distressing sequences, such as the solitary female methodically slitting the throats of strung-up chickens, or the livestock visibly panicking on the conveyor belts before their imminent deaths, Our Daily Bread retains its meditative tone. This isn't a film which tells you what to think, and it doesn't propose any alternatives to the status-quo, yet it has the gift of making you look at reality anew.
Our Daily Bread is out in the UK on 25th January 2008.
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