1.
Two comprehensive shots of the scene as the children gathered to await the scattering of the crescent bread.


2.
Two shots of four bakers with baskets full of the crescent shaped rolls.


3.
Different shots, taken from the various angles, of the bakers taking the "bent-breads" from their baskets and throwing them to the children, and of the children catching or collecting the rolls and eating them.




Initials TDH/V/PB



Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: A custom so ancient that its origin is forgotten, brought many hundreds of Dutch children to a hillside on the edge of the old town of Sittard in the south of Holland on Sunday, 27th March, together with the local bakers.

Visnews cameras filmed the bakers throwing to the excited children some 5,000 rolls of new bread, crescent shaped and crisp. Many of the rolls were dexterously caught as they flew through the air: others were scrambled for as they fell on the muddy ground.

Some say that this "Festival of the Bent Bread" is a religious one commemorating the breaking and distribution of bread by Christ to his disciples at the Last Supper. Others maintain that the festival is merely an anachronistic survival of a centuries-old charity by which the rich distributed bread, in mid-Lent, to the children of the poor. Another theory is that the custom originated in heathen times before Christianity came to Western Europe.

No-one knows, and the children appeared to be much more interested in eating the bread than in inquiring why it had been thrown to them.