Our chicken nuggets come to us as perfect little things, uniform in size and taste. So, too, our fish filets and broccolini and precut carrots. This is one of the goals of industrialized agriculture: to deliver us the same food experience, over and over again. And while we might appreciate that an actual living thing exists at the other end of this system, few of us have any inkling of what happens along the way. Enter Our Daily Bread, director Nikolaus Geyrhalter's latest documentary—a disturbing and at times weirdly beautiful odyssey into Europe's food factories.

Geyrhalter says he made the film to dispel some of the alienation that we feel toward our food, but the effect might be just the opposite. The world of high-tech food processing is far stranger than we could possibly have suspected. Giant hoses suck salmon out of holding pens. Sunflowers are made to wilt on precise schedules. High-speed assembly lines parade pigs around a factory floor. Our Daily Bread captures a sterilized, futuristic dreamscape where hamburger patties are produced with the same mechanized efficiency as crayons. The film is like a Mr. Rogers field trip gone wrong—you'll never look at your nuggets the same way again.