
Our Daily Bread
A slaughterhouse floor runs red under fluorescent lights while workers hose it down between shifts. Nikolaus Geyrhalter's camera holds still for that scene and dozens like it, moving through the factories, greenhouses, and feedlots that supply European supermarkets, with no narration, no interviews, and no music to soften what is on screen. Chickens move down a conveyor belt by the thousand, calves are herded through chutes, and rows of hothouse tomatoes stretch further than the frame can hold. Workers eat lunch on breaks between tasks that range from artificial insemination of pigs to harvesting salt from a mine, and the film treats each process with the same flat, wide-screen patience, letting scale itself make the argument. There is no villain and no voiceover telling you how to feel about any of it. What emerges instead is a portrait of food production as pure industrial choreography, precise, enormous, and largely invisible to the people who eat the results.