Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread is an Austrian documentary about industrial farming, consisting of long, wordless takes of repetitive industrial processes which are strangely hypnotic. (Imagine Koyaanisqatsi minus the Philip Glass music. Actually, you don't have to imagine it, you can get a taste by watching the trailers at the link above.)

The filmmakers claim to be open-minded:

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

OUR DAILY BREAD is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn’t always easy to digest - and in which we all take part. A pure, meticulous and high-end film experience that enables the audience to form their own ideas.

But the medium is the message and the film is clearly designed to make us deplore the vast, inhuman monotony of industrial farming and food processing (and to be deeply, deeply grateful we don't have the jobs we see on screen). And god knows it's no trick to provoke a visceral "anti" reaction with footage of a slaughterhouse in action (which is, unsurprisingly, the hard-to-watch climax). Now, I think there's a lot to dislike about industrial farming, but I think there's a lot to dislike about malnutrition and famine, too, which were the constant lot of mankind until very recently, and the lack of an historical context for industrial processes means that Our Daily Bread expresses a kind of arty intellectual disdain for how 36 eggs get into a carton without wrestling with the issues of how you feed a human population as large as today's.

Nevertheless, I think it's well worth seeing. Why? Because, in its arty Sprockets-Tarkovsky way, it shows us a world that affects all of us yet very few of us actually see. It's often appalling to watch, or even more appalling when it's quite fascinating to watch, but if you're eating it, it's only honest to confront how it got to you. Our Daily Bread provides a strangely beautiful, almost dreamlike vision of the secret life and death of your food before it came to you.

Our Daily Bread will be on the Sundance Channel at 12:35 am Thursday night/Friday morning and 10:35 am Friday morning, and Sunday at 3:35 pm.