SummaryAfter 40 years of running their community arts space, The Bread Factory, Dorothea and Greta are suddenly fighting for survival when a celebrity couple--performance artists from China--come to Checkford and build an enormous complex down the street catapulting big changes in their small town.
Directed By:Patrick Wang
Written By:Patrick Wang
A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
91
User score
Universal Acclaim
8.1
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Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
91
100% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Oct 25, 2018
100
A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.
Oct 25, 2018
100
Wang, weaving deftly in and out of his ensemble and revealing the characters’ interconnected relationships in piecemeal fashion, shows how the bonds of community and activism intersect, not always conveniently, with those of love and family.
Oct 25, 2018
91
Despite Wang’s habit of casual stylistic quotation (riffing on Ingmar Bergman’s compressed close-ups here, Wes Anderson’s whip pans there), A Bread Factory remains stubbornly its own thing.
Oct 25, 2018
90
Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.
Oct 28, 2018
88
Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.
Oct 25, 2018
75
Part One, subtitled For the Sake of Gold, is original and intriguing.
Dec 27, 2018
67
The film is episodic and often veers into hit-or-miss flights of fancy.
User score
Universal Acclaim
8.1
86% Positive
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
14% Mixed
1 Rating
1 Rating
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
Apr 19, 2020
9
This review will cover parts one and two -- it's really one long movie though it tells many stories. If you need to be spoon-fed a simple story in coherent chunks, I suggest looking elsewhere. This is not a film for simple-minded people. It wanders and dithers and sprawls and never has the same style for fifteen minutes on end. It is as various and wonderful and infuriating as life itself. It took me about an hour to begin to grasp how the various stories were related to one another, and another couple of hours to see that incoherence was part of the message. The last hour brings the stories home, though it's no place I've ever lived, yet it's every place at once. The array of talent is awesome. If you love theater, you should not miss this film. To say more would truly be gilding the lily.
Jun 25, 2022
7
The cost and sacrifice of making real art. Maybe too idealistic, but if you can't have hope for it, then this film and many others who fight for it would be meaningless. The only thing I didn't like, is that despite being two hours long, it feels longer than that. The pace is quite slow.
Production Company:
- In the Family
- Vanishing Angle
Release Date:Oct 26, 2018
Duration:2 h 2 m
Website:
Awards
International Cinephile Society Awards
• 4 Nominations
Film Independent Spirit Awards
• 2 Nominations
