A documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Unrated. Plays Friday to next Thursday (January 26 to February 1), except Saturday (January 27), at the Vancity Theatre

That tasty stuff that ends up on our tables—how does it get there? That’s the main query answered—if wordlessly, and with many more questions raised—by Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s enigmatic documentary, which takes a visual tour of the food industry, to quietly disturbing effect.

If James Longley’s similarly non-narrated and image-driven Iraq in Fragments, with which this 90-minute effort is paired, is on the Ridley Scott side of filmmaking, Our Daily Bread takes more of a Peter Greenaway approach, with calm, painterly tableaux of life, with an emphasis on agribusiness and mass-produced meat.

Best known for his Elsewhere, a peripatetic tour of vacation spots on the eve of the millennial changeover, Austria’s Geyrhalter, here working structurally with frequent collaborator Wolfgang Widerhofer, has an obvious fascination for industrial zones, difficult workplaces, and other neglected locales. He’s a tourist who doesn’t ask for directions, or even context; he doesn’t bother with title cards to tell us where we are, nor does he translate the bits of German or Arabic we overhear as workers kill chickens or operate machinery to water fields or pick olives.

The slaughterhouse scenes are particularly stark, but it’s too much to assume that the filmmakers are indicting carnivorism or even the brutally mechanized ways in which voiceless animals are turned into dinner. Geyrhalter is as interested in the workers and their physical spaces as he is in their work; the viewer, finally, is left to ponder the inner meanings of this process, with its factory eggs and conveyer-belt piglets.

Because of its tone of silence, strange beauty, and commonplace horror, this Bread will be a bit tough for some viewers. But it makes a provocative meal for humans ready to contemplate where we really sit in the food chain. Just make sure you’ve already eaten.