Two things about Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian: It’s not likely to reach its nearest-to-ideal audience, and a vital part of its subject matter is never explicitly addressed. Let’s hold the first matter for a moment and turn to the second.

If a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, what is a lot of knowledge? Often it’s a painful burden, as you’ll find if you try to plan a meal after seeing this Austrian documentary, directed with unsettling pseudo-detachment by Erwin Wagenhofer. He travels across Europe and South America to explore the modern food industry, in which profitability is tied to productivity. Fishermen in Brittany demonstrate how the industrialized trawlers that are putting them out of business harvest poor quality fish; European price controls make it impossible for African farmers to make a living wage; Romanian farmers are forced to use genetically modified seeds that have to be repurchased every year because other seeds will be destroyed by pesticides. At every step, the quality of the food produced and the workers who are displaced declines. The film is most perversely fascinating in a segment in a chicken processing plant that makes you question your definition of “life.” But watching the film leaves you with the notion that there is no moral way to sustain life other than growing and consuming your own produce and livestock. As such, it’s a film filled with information that people need to know delivered in a format that some may not be able to handle.