Original subtitles

The sands that drift across our world

hold a secret.

Over the centuries,

we have learned that these golden grains

can be magically transformed.

This is a story

of an artist

who turned sand

into glass...

creating wonderous objects

inspired by nature.

They say

she can capture the wind.

The wind has a special purpose

as it blows across the flat lands

of the Netherlands.

Centuries ago,

the Dutch became a nation of wind catchers,

harnessing its power.

It's here

that Bibi lives,

a glassmaker famed

for an act of magic.

Inside her creations,

she conjures the wind.

In her workshop,

she follows the ancient process

of glassmaking...

Each step

calling upon

one of nature's primal elements:

Air

and earth...

water...

and fire.

She begins by placing sand in her furnace.

Fire

is the frontier that changes everything.

The texture of molten glass

is extraordinary.

It is neither a solid

nor a liquid.

Bibi likens it to honey.

Inside her crucible

you can hear the last grains of sand

slowly transforming into glass.

Nature has its own furnaces.

Inside these wonderous rivers

flow currents of silver and gold...

But the richest ingredient by far

is silica,

the crystal building blocks of glass.

In Hawaii,

these streams are said to embody

the island's goddess of fire and creation...

Pele-honua-mea.

Pele-honua-mea

is also a goddess

of the wind,

and as she blows across

the silica rich lava,

dark volcanic glass

is formed.

Around the world,

the wind breathes life

into nature,

and for Bibi,

it is an irresistible challenge

to catch hold of its playful spirit.

The next element in her process

is air.

Through a hollow pipe,

Bibi's apprentice delivers a gentle breath.

As it's infused with air,

the glassmaker's creation begins to take shape.

As she spins the glass,

Bibi imagines the wind in every shimmering strand.

Still at hundreds of degrees,

these threads fuse

into the surface of the glass...

Creating textures and distortions

that will eventually play with the light.

As the hours pass,

she returns the glass to the furnace...

The heat allowing it to be further shaped

and transformed.

Curiously, all molten glass looks the same.

Only as it cools

do the true colors begin to emerge.

In the heat of her evolving creation,

Bibi senses the deep hues

and radiance of a sunrise.

Some say the earliest glass on Earth

was created by accident.

As Arabian nomads journeyed across the desert,

their campfires may well

have fused and transformed the sands

on which they burned.

Pieces of glass

found in nature

are often dark and clouded,

colored by the elements from which they were forged.

Desert glass

is the color of burnished sand.

Creating glass as colorless

and invisible as the wind

would take ancient glassmakers

centuries to perfect...

But the results would be sublime.

Water is the glassmaker's final element.

In Renaissance Venice,

a guild glassblowers

lived on the nearby island of Murano.

For generations they worked in secret

in search of completely new type of glass.

Perhaps seeking to capture

the reflections around their workshops,

they were the first to invent cristallo...

Glass,

breathtaking in its purity.

Their secret was adding powders of manganese

to their furnaces

to remove the colors and impurities within sand.

They created a glass as translucent

as the water

and the wind.

The secrets of clear glass

would eventually escape the waterways of Venice...

Carried by merchants

across the trade routes of Europe

to the artisans and workshops

of the Netherlands.

Fire and air,

water and earth...

each element has played its part

in Bibi's process.

In the last moments with her creation,

she studies its contours

and makes final adjustments to its shape.

As the glass finally cools,

the perfect clarity she sought

slowly emerges.

She smooths away imperfections.

Like the wind,

it has no true color.

Instead, it does something remarkable:

It absorbs the colors around it.

With the elements,

Bibi has transformed glass

into the essence of the wind.

The way it moves over the water...

The way it flows across the land...

The way

it shapes our world.