Michael Glawogger's five-part film follows manual laborers doing some of the hardest physical work still done by hand. In Ukraine, miners descend illegal shafts in the Donbass coalfields with nothing but headlamps and hand tools. On the volcano Kawah Ijen in Indonesia, workers carry baskets of raw sulfur down a crater trail, loads that can weigh over 70 kilograms, for a few dollars a day. At a slaughterhouse in Lagos, Nigeria, men butcher cattle in the open air amid crowds and stray dogs. In Gaddani, Pakistan, laborers break apart massive oil tankers by hand, cutting steel hulls apart with torches and dragging the scrap onto the beach. The film closes in China and Germany, contrasting an active steel mill with the same industry's leftovers: a decommissioned German steelworks that has been turned into a leisure park, complete with tourists posing where furnaces once ran. Glawogger shoots without narration or interviews, following the work itself in long, unbroken takes, letting the labor and its toll speak without commentary.