THE SALT OF THE EARTH World Cinema

This artistic documentary on famous Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, often referred to as the master of black-and-white photojournalism, is co-directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. It blends new images of Salgado’s photographs with interviews wherein he talks about his life traveling the world to capture the human condition. Salgado recalls the backstories and details of many of his sometimes disturbing images, from his well-known photographs of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mines in his native Brazil, to his images of famine and genocide in African villages and other countries around the globe. The filmmaker’s son explains that his father wasn’t around much during his upbringing, as he was always traveling for work, often for years at a time. However, father and son worked together recently to shoot in Siberia; as an older man, Salgado has shifted his focus to capturing Earth’s beauty.