Our Daily Bread
Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s spare and unflinching meditation on the industrial food complex is more high-concept art project than activist propaganda—think KOYAANISQATSI rather than SUPER SIZE ME—but its dispassionate portrait of the scale, machinery, labor and practices behind our meals packs a wallop. Bucking documentary convention, the film forgoes talking-head interviews, voice-over narration and obvious agenda in favor of long tracking shots and fixed cameras to present a nominally depoliticized work of quiet radicalism.
Claus Hansen Petz, Arkadiusz Rydellek, Barbara Hinz
- Notes From Ari WegnerTruth be told, I ended up watching this by accident. I was at a film festival and planned to see something else, but it was sold out so I bought a ticket to OUR DAILY BREAD as a way to pass the time before having dinner with friends. I had no expectations. And yet I was spellbound. I spent the next hour and a half riveted and in awe of the images of this film. With zero voice-over or factual context and mostly long takes, this film is as powerful as they come—moments of revelation, meditation and even unexpected humor. The daily processes of how our food arrives to us are laid bare in this documentary, and I walked out of the cinema seeing the world completely differently. Honestly, it’s a film I still think about most days.
