What makes Our Daily Bread more fascinating — and in most cases more unsettling — than other food-related films is its lack of narrative oversight. A documentary like Super Size Me can be effective, but talking heads do a fair share of the heavy lifting.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot in its original German) takes a step back and lets the industrial food industry speak through action. For an hour and a half, Geyrhalter solemnly captures scenes of industrialized farming without judgement. There are no voice-overs. There is no dialogue. The only voices in the film come from background chatter or the rare strain of music leaking from a radio.

Many of the scenes in Our Daily Bread are long and uninterrupted — a lone worker picks banana peppers from a greenhouse the size of several metropolitan blocks; vast acres of corn are patrolled and combed by alien-looking tractors; the silence of sterile slaughterhouses broken only by hoof on metal; and in one of the most uncomfortable scenes, thousands of fuzzy chicks are shot out of machinery into fast-moving baskets, treated less like living animals and more like widgets.

The silence that hovers over every scene is shocking. The one scene that particularly stands out has a lone worker on her lunch break. She is eating with no one, just staring off as she quietly finishes her cigarette and coffee. It made me yearn for conversation; I then realized that she would probably go back on the clock and not talk to anyone — maybe not even see anyone — for the rest of her shift.

I think it would be hard to watch the movie and not form some sort of strong opinion. As unbiased as the movie is, it’s nothing if not damning of the processed food industry. In fact, having just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Geyrhalter’s film works as a great companion piece for the book. The eastern European farms shown in this documentary are certainly efficient, but the cost to be so ends up turning the process into something from a distopian science fiction novel.

With the film’s subject and it’s icy portrayal of large-scale food, I can’t see many of the unconverted walking in unawares. It’s preaching to the choir, in a way. But in a good way, I think. And Our Daily Bread may change some hearts and minds.

The most frightening thing about the movie, though, is the silence. I keep coming back to this, but for a good reason. I’ve spent some times on smaller, family owned farms. The work is hard, and it’s not always perfect. But there’s an element of community that extends beyond the property line — not only is the sweat and laughter and chatter shared on the farm, the surrounding community that benefits from their work are often able to shake the hand of the man or woman that provide produce or poultry for their family. In Our Daily Bread, the silence is deafening.

Runtime: 92 minutes
Not rated
2006 (theater), 2008 (DVD)