4 Elements

In 2003, Dutch director Jiska Rickels won several awards with her critically acclaimed graduation film , about an old lignite mine in Germany. This film is now part of an ambitious four-part documentary on the primordial elements. In , Rickels shows how man lives and works in both struggle and symbiosis with fire, water, earth and air. She follows forest fire-fighters, king crab fishermen on the Bering Sea, German mineworkers and Russian cosmonauts. The precise and aesthetic images tell their story without words, and are accompanied by a musical score that often seamlessly merges with sounds from the film. Rickels alternates spectacular scenes (an immense curtain of smoke that rises out of the forest as if by magic, a glimmering rocket blasting through the night, fishermen as they haul in gigantic traps full of jumbo crabs) with intimate, almost tender images that reveal the men in their literal and metaphorical nakedness (in the shower, scrubbing each other's backs, silently drinking coffee before heading off to work, hoarsely singing melancholy songs around the campfire). From the darkest depths of the mine to the lift that transports space travellers to their shuttle, not only shows man's awe of nature, it shows how the two are inextricably linked.