Hungry

A mysterious roving camera zooms, glides and prowls through a series of eerily empty landscapes in Hungry, a lightly experimental documentary with a stark eco-disaster message from LA-born, Vienna-based director Susanne Brandstaetter. Looking down from a great height on parched deserts, poisoned seas and rusting factories, then swooping close for melancholy rambles through derelict shopping malls and crumbling ghost towns, this montage of bleakly beautiful vistas soon reveals itself to be contemporary footage of planet Earth. No visual trickery, no production design, just a dystopian panorama of depopulated, polluted and abandoned locations. These are the liminal post-industrial badlands of the present day standing in for disturbingly plausible near-future colony collapse.

One of the more formally adventurous world premieres at Rotterdam film festival this week, Hungry blends impressionistic montage, eerie soundtrack music and off-screen interview fragments into an eye-catching, often incongruously lovely whole. At times the film’s arty, coolly detached, semi-abstract style recalls the work of fellow Austrian documentary director Niklolaus Geyrhalter (Our Daily Bread, Melt) and the maverick British newsreel collagist Adam Curtis (Hypernormalisation). A combination of this strong aesthetic and newsworthy subject matter should ensure it finds an audience beyond the festival circuit.

Pitched as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi documentary, the conceit behind Hungry is that we are watching some future cinematic survey of a ravaged Earth, as seen through the detached viewpoint of an extra-terrestrial visitor, or possibly a sentient AI machine, who is gathering evidence to better understand how humankind came to die from a catastrophic combination of climate change and food shortages. The entire planet is a crime scene, and the unseen narrator is looking for clues, seeking to clarify how humans went so badly wrong. “Does the capacity o understand a threat equate to the ability to react to it?” he ponders in his cool Hal 9000-style voice-over. “Their value systems seem to have been fundamentally misaligned with biological reality… why?”

To help address these questions, the film’s slightly clunky fictional conceptual premise allows the all-seeing narrator access to archive audio files of interviews that Brandstaetter conducted with a brainy panel of professors, molecular biologists, nutritionists, botanists, biochemists and others, including experts on food politics and agricultural biodiversity. Playing behind the mesmerising visual montages, the unseen speakers begin mapping out the links between climate change, soil degradation and crop failure, which leads to destruction of ecosystems and ultimately damages the human food chain.

“We are really on the edge of extermination as a species,” one speaker warns. “This is a global experiment that we are doing without any controls,” says another. “People will literally starve to death.” One microbiologist even takes bleak comfort in predicting that other lifeforms will outlive us, thus proving that humans are “not that important in the overall scheme of things.”

As these disembodied discussions progress, they take on an increasingly political dimension. Brandstaetter and her guests forensically lay out how the cumulative effect of harmful agriculture techniques, ultra-processed foods, profiteering multinational corporations, powerful lobbying groups and weak government regulation has massively increased risk of a climate-driven food disaster.

Even so, the director resists full-blooded fatalism, asking each of her experts to suggest potential ways for humankind to avert the impending foodpocalypse. Their solutions include planting more resilient crops, breaking up huge agribusiness monopolies, enforcing existing legislation and more. Small gestures, admittedly, but they elevate Hungry from just being a relentless bleak doom sermon. As a means of couching potentially dry subject matter inside a compelling stylistic package, Brandstaetter’s unorthdox cine-essay approach is largely effective. Whether it adds any fresh or challenging insights to these familiar journalistic topics is debatable, but this is still a finely crafted, intelligent and haunting audio-visual artwork

Director, screenwriter, producer: Susanne Brandstaetter
Cast: Jack Gilbert, Heribert Hirt, Michelle Meagher, Marion Nestle, Jeff Ricketts, Zephyr Teachout, Lewis Ziska
Cinematography: Joerg Burger
Editing: Lisa Zoe Geretschläger, Stephan Bechinger
Music, sound design: Peter Kutin, Rojin Sharafi
Production company
Susanne Brandstaetter Film Production (Austria)
World sales: Impronta Films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English
95 minutes