Review of Our Daily Bread (2006) by Jean-Francois V — 27 Sep 2008

"Our Daily Bread" is a film I find it difficult to review, because I don't know what it is, I don't know what it is about, and I don't know what its point is.

I don't think it is a documentary, in that its primary aim does not seem to be to document its subject. The absence of a voiceover has the effect of letting the viewer guess what it is he is seeing, and deprives him of any meaningful statistics or pieces of context that might help him understand the meaning and relevance of what is being shown.

I would guess therefore that this film is a piece of modern art, which tries to elicit a mood by piecing together still shots of the food industry that evoke echoes of such films as THX 1138, Metropolis, Aliens, Silent Running, Modern Times and the works of Jacques Tati. In a way, it hijacks the documentary genre by turning it into an inside joke for movie buffs.

"Our Daily Bread" is not an activist film. At best, it will disillusion viewers whose image of food production comes from the mythology created by advertising, something I personally didn't need as I try to avoid all advertising in whatever form it may come.

The film is not even particularly concerned about animals, though it does show scenes of animal cruelty that might convert its less morally anesthesized viewers to veganism. The emotion it seeks to elicit is not anger at the injustice of our treatment of animals. There were images I just couldn't watch, but they were a minority. I would call them obscene- gory couplings of machines and beasts. Many of the scenes I believe intended to show the mere incongruity of our food industry. Both the animals and the human employees have been displaced, cut off from their natural environment, and forced to live in conditions that turn them into food-producing automata, either as victims or as killers or mutilators of carcasses.

Remember too that this is not an undercover film, and that therefore you are not being shown what modern companies do not want you to see. This is just what they are not too ashamed of, rightly or wrongly.

And then there are scenes that are just impressive for the cleverness of the technology they show - unless of course you are a technophobe or have a fear of robots, in which case they will blend more neatly into the rest of the movie.

I didn't find the film uninteresting, and I might understand its point some day, unless it is just to make the viewer go 0_o.