Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history: international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes: a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.
The Salt of the Earth is an exceptional portrait of Sebastião Salgado, elevated enormously by the photographs themselves and the cinematography surrounding them — Wim Wenders finds inventive, reverential ways to present still images within a moving film, making the visual experience genuinely extraordinary. The dual-narrator structure (Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano) gives the documentary an unusual intimacy and layering that sets it apart from standard retrospectives. The plot follows a fairly conventional arc for artist documentaries — life, work, tragedy, redemption — and while Salgado's story is genuinely moving, the structure doesn't surprise. Acting is not applicable in a traditional sense, though Salgado himself is a compelling, articulate presence on screen. Novelty is solid: the film's formal conceit of a photographer being filmed by another photographer-director gives it a reflective quality, but it remains within documentary conventions. The ending, focusing on Salgado's ecological reforestation project, provides emotional uplift but feels somewhat tidy given the harrowing weight of the earlier material.