Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Nikolaus Geyrhalter was born in Vienna, Austria in 1972. Geyrhalter's static-camera, well-paced observational films tackle their subjects head-on, whether it's exploring the terrain in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Pripyat), tracing the route of the Dakar Rally (7915 Km), or investigating the production of processed foods (Our Daily Bread).
At the age of 22, Geyrhalter started his own production company, Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion (NGF). He made his first film, Eisenerz, in 1992. Two years later Geyrhalter shot his first documentary, Washed Up (Angeschwemmt). Audiences, jurors, and critics took notice of Geyrhalter with Pripyat (1999), which won the SCAM Award at the Cinéma du Réel Festival and the Grand Prize at Diagonale Graz. He followed Pripyat with the epic four-hour globe-hopping documentary, Elsewhere (2001). The film screened at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Jihlava Film Festival, and won a Special Jury Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA). His next feature, Our Daily Bread (2005), won a Special Jury Award at IDFA as well.
In the following decade, Geyrhalter examined night labor in Europe with Abendland (2011) and landscapes of urban decay across the world in Homo Sapiens (2016). The latter film played at the Berlinale Forum, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Cinéma du Réel Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the Viennale. Geyrhalter's films have also screened at the Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight.
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Abendland
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2011 • 90 minutes
Western standard of living and the urge to exclude others from it are at the core of this film. Entirely shot at night, Geyrhalter takes us on a very personal journey through Europe and the structures that guarantee our “civilized...
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CERN
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • With Pauline Gagnon • 2013 • 75 minutes
Award-winning director Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Our Daily Bread, Abendland) delivers stunning images from inside the immense CERN, the research center in Switzerland where they try to recreate the big bang. Alter...
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Elsewhere Part I
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2010 • 117 minutes
From Nikolaus Geyrhalter, the director of OUR DAILY BREAD, comes this IDFA Special Jury Award-winning documentary, an epic journey to twelve remote and rarely glimpsed locales and communities around the world. Geyerhalter films e...
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Elsewhere Part II
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2010 • 129 minutes
An homage to humanity, ELSEWHERE is a nuanced portrait of life - fragile and resilient - at the start of the 21st century. The episodes in Part II are - July – Ladakh/India It is Tsewang Dolma’s turn to cook lunch today. She is s...
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Homo Sapiens
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2016 • 94 minutes
HOMO SAPIENS is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being.
What will remain of our lives after we're gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities in...
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Matter Out of Place
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2023 • 105 minutes
Waste on the shores, waste on the mountains. On ocean floors and deep down in the earth. The term “matter out of place” refers to objects in a place they originally do not belong to. And there are many such objects in the places ...
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Our Daily Bread
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2005 • 92 minutes
OUR DAILY BREAD reveals the little-known world of high-tech agriculture. In a series of visually stunning, continuously tracking, wide-screen images that seem right out of a science-fiction movie, we see the places where food is c...
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Over the Years
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 2015 • 186 minutes
An observation of what happens to a few manual laborers over a period of 10 years. A film about the process of becoming unemployed, told from the perspective of people who know. It represents a memorial to industrial sectors in t...
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Pripyat
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter • Documentary • 1999 • 100 minutes
After the nuclear catastrophe in 1986, a 30 km restricted zone was erected around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and 116,000 persons were evacuated from this area. Pripyat is a portrait of the people who still live and work t...
