Scheppers

‘Everyone is the creator of his or her own happiness’, a well-known proverb says. In Scheppers, this can be taken quite literally: the searchers use shovels to look for evidence of happiness in a quagmire. In the dark, black mud of a sandpit in the south-eastern Holland, a group of people search for six-million-year-old fossilized sharks’ teeth. Each has their own method to recover the ‘fossil gold’: a sifting machine, a deluxe hand sieve, a simple biscuit tin or bare hands. Although the commercial value of the teeth is negligible, these amateur palaeontologists cherish them as small treasures. They don’t make money at it and there are hundreds of teeth, so why do they do it every day? What drives them? The prize or the act of searching itself? All of them look for their holy grail, these mysterious primordial teeth of one of of the oldest, still existing, life-forms on the planet. The operator of an excavator has his own thoughts: ‘One person makes a film, another might look for shark’s teeth and a third may go skiing in winter. That’s the difference. But, myself, I will do none of the three’. The filmmaker’s observations produce poetic images. Fragments of spouting mud evoke associations with the famous paintings by American abstract-expressionist, Jackson Pollock. Perhaps the quest for shark’s teeth mirrors the philosophy of action painting: it’s not the results that count, but the activities leading up to it. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)