Bread on the table: documentary film and the future of French food

One of the most pressing issues of interest to the partisans of international social and political documentary is the current state of food production and the effects of industrialized agriculture on human health and safety, rural life and biodiversity. A significant and growing subset of political documentaries critiquing the food system are gaining increased audiences, crossing media platforms and influencing public opinion and behavior. French filmmakers and activists have made important contributions to these debates and their implications in France. This article focuses on three recent films, Herbe/Grass (Mathieu Levain and Olivier Porte, 2009), Nos enfants nous accuseront/Our Children Will Accuse Us (Jean-Paul Jaud, 2009) and Republique de la malbouffe/Republic of Bad Food (Jacques Goldstein, 2012), all of which take up these issues from various angles. In addition to pointing out the problems inherent in specific agricultural practices in France, these films also make important new contributions to a long-standing conversation about the place of rural peoples, rural spaces and agricultural production in the French nation. They are also formally adventurous, reshaping the parameters of the expository mode in documentary by complicating the relationship between commentary and image in order to elicit both complicity and action from the viewer.