At first, watching this film feels like a task as the seemingly boring video moves along from the man hosing the slaughter house to the man checking up on the chicks to the men preparing for dusting the pepper plants. But it so happens that with passing time, we become unaware of the surrounding as we keep watching the chicks being separated and vaccinated or the cows being prepared and we don’t know when we are hooked and are nearing the end of the film. Our case is similar to that of a frog in a heating water who doesn’t know precisely at what time it was cooked. Such is the speechless beauty of this film.
A film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Our Daily Bread is devoid of the usual commentary by a narrator or the interviews of important people of the field. It simply moves along showing us images of the agriculture industry and how industrialization has changed the way our food is processed. Machine after machine works on the pigs or the cows till the end product is obtained. On the other side there are various machines that work the fields right from planting to dusting to harvesting.
It makes us watch in awe the processes of how our daily food reaches us; which most of us are still unaware. The absence of voice over is the best part of Geyrhalter’s film. Like other documentaries, it does not pose a positive or negative story. It simply puts the unadulterated pictures in front of us and lets us form our own opinions. Now it is left to us if to be in awe of the way we have industrialized our food production or to contemplate as to where we have left our legacy of family farming which was devoid of chemicals and artificially grown animals and which was in balance with the environment and at the same time, bio-diverse.
That is the best part of the film, which begins after we’ve watched it. It makes us think, whether what we saw was good or was it bad. I am sure that there can be great debates if we decide to put our individual thoughts on the tables based on this film as each individual amongst us will take something different from this film.