Our Daily Bread

No Worries

March 1994 •English

A family is forced off their farm due to drought, and move to Sydney.

Sounds of Sand

May 2007 •French

On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.

Signs

August 2002 •English

A family living on a farm finds mysterious crop circles in their fields which suggests something more frightening to come.

Nostalgia

May 1983 •Russian

A Russian poet, Andrei and his interpreter, Eugenia travel to Italy to research the life of an 18th-century composer.

The Naked Island

November 1960 •Japanese

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.

Wild Things

March 1998 •English

When teen-socialite Kelly Van Ryan and troubled bad girl Suzie Toller accuse guidance counselor Sam Lombardo of rape, he's suspended by the school, rejected by the town, and fighting to get his life back. One cop suspects conspiracy, but nothing is what it seems...

Golden Harvest

September 1933 •English

A play by Nina Wilcox Putnam was the source for the empire-building drama Golden Harvest. Ambitious grain trader Chris Martin corners the wheat market and becomes a millionaire. Outgrowing his humble farm beginnings, Chris makes a bid for respectability by marrying Chicago socialite Cynthia Flint.

Absurdistan

January 2008 •German

An allegorical comedy centered on two childhood sweethearts who seem destined for one another until the women of their isolated village, angered by male indifference toward the water shortage, go on a sex strike that threatens the young couple's first night of love.

Silent Souls

June 2010 •Russian

Miron Alekseevich, director of a paper and pulp mill, goes to bury his wife Tanya in the place where they once spent their honeymoon. He goes not alone, but with a photographer named Stork, to whom he tells touching details of his life with Tanya. The narrative weaves together the memories of the characters, as well as the rituals and beliefs of the Meri people, a small Finnish tribe that once lived in the Northern Volga region and dissolved among the Russians.

The Airy Tomb

July 1963 •English

Can there be a bleaker portrait of a life half-lived? Cinematic treatment of poet R.S. Thomas's story of Twm, the "shy soul" who lives and dies alone in the "grim house nailed to the mountainside", oblivious to the interest shown in him by young girls in the village and to his own isolation as he scratches a living from the farm.

Ross & Beth

July 2014 •English

The story of a humble farming couple, a sudden upheaval and an unlikely saviour.

Dreamland

November 2019 •English

Amid the dust storms and economic depression of Dust Bowl Era Oklahoma, Eugene Evans finds his family farm on the brink of foreclosure. Discovering fugitive bank robber Allison Wells hiding in his small town, he is torn between claiming the bounty on her head and his growing attraction to the seductive criminal.

Solarbabies

November 1986 •English

In a future in which most water has disappeared from the Earth, we find a group of children, mostly teenagers, who are living at an orphanage, run by the despotic rulers of the new Earth. The group in question plays a hockey based game on roller skates and is quite good. It has given them a unity that transcends the attempts to bring them to heel by the government. Finding an orb of special power, they find it has unusual effects on them. They escape from the orphanage (on skates) and try to cross the wasteland looking for a place they can live free as the storm-troopers search for them and the orb.

Eau de la vie

May 1994 •English

Catherine is taken to dine at "Eau de la vie" an opulent cafe known for its unusual entertainment. Her business associates Grant and Sarah intend to initiate her into their sordid society and strip her of her innocence. Catherine must choose from a small group of performers who will entertain the diners for the evening. She selects a young attractive man unaware that the finale of the evenings entertainment will end in his dead. To save the young man she has chosen, Catherine is driven to fight for her own life but oblivious to her struggle the other diners believe it is all part of the evening's entertainment Catherine has to stand alone. They say that evil triumphs when good people do nothing. Eau de la vie is a dark tale of hedonism and individual courage.

The Exterminating Angel

May 1962 •Spanish

A formal dinner party starts out normally enough, but after the bourgeois group retire to the host’s music room, they inexplicably find themselves unable to leave.

Flight of the Phoenix

December 2004 •English

When an oil rig in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia proves unproductive, an aircraft crew are sent to shut the operation down and fly them out. On the flight out over the desert on the way to Beijing, Capt. Frank Towns and co-pilot A.J. are unable to keep their cargo plane, a C-119 Flying Boxcar, in the air when a violent sandstorm strikes. Crash-landing in a remote uncharted part of the desert, the two pilots and their passengers -- a crew of oil workers and a drifter -- must work together to survive by rebuilding the aircraft. Soon, low supplies and a band of merciless smugglers add even greater urgency to their task.

Cada Vez Mais Longe

June 2014 •Portuguese

Sexy Thing

May 2006 •English

The story of a young girl who escapes her reality by immersing herself in a watery version of the world.

The Water Diary

June 2006 •English

A story through a child's eyes about living through a drought.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

June 2022 •Japanese

An eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. It is a geographic description of the work and non-work of a farmer. A portrait, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a soundscape, and of duration itself. A film-as-adaptive-landscape. A georgic in five books.