Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Several billion tons of earth are moved annually by humans - with shovels, excavators and dynamite. In seven locations in North America and Europe, we observe miners, engineers and foremen at work in in mines, quarries and large construction sites, engaged in a constant struggle to take possession of the planet.

In the tradition of such acclaimed cinéma direct works as Jean Eustache's Le Cochon (1970) and Frederick Wiseman's Meat (1976) comes Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 92-minute documentary Our Daily Bread – an ironic, detached cinematic glimpse of how the food we eat on a daily basis is picked, killed, mechanically processed, and packaged for human consumption. Geyrhalter resists having an overtly political or muckraking agenda; instead, his sequence of images acts as an extended visual meditation, a plunge into the poetic mundanity of everyday existence. By singling out processes that we would otherwise take for granted or overlook, Geyrhalter calls our attention to the more absurd and surreal aspects of the food chain – with the graceful and rhythmic, yet thoroughly strange and haunting, processes of automatization in the foreground.

After 1986, a restricted zone was erected at a radius of 30km around Chernobyl. More than 100.000 people have been evacuated from there, but some have remained or returned. "Pripyat" follows four protagonists who live or work in this zone.

Homo Sapiens shows stunning images of forgotten places, buildings we constructed and then left.

CERN in Switzerland is a research center where they try to recreate the big bang. Nikolaus Geyrhalter follows the center's infrastructure and meets the people who created the "Large Hadron Collider".