"The Salt of the Earth" is a documentary portrait of the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and masterpiece of one of the great visual artists Wim Wenders. Co-director of the film is the son of the photographer, Juliano. Over the past 40 years, Salgado has been on the continents, witnessing some of the most important events of our recent history: international conflicts, famine, and emigration. His poignant photographs of human destinies are presented all over the world, but the photographer is often accused of exploiting the victims for his own benefit. However one of Sebastiao Salgado's pictures was on the cover of my facebook profile for a very long time. It is part of his "Genesis" series and shows the secret places of the world as we have never seen them. Black and white photography takes you on a mystical journey that you do not know where it will end, but you long to go to the mist with the small wooden boat in the foreground. With such a story begins the film "The Salt of the Earth", dedicated to the Brazilian photographer, with the story of director Wim Wenders about his first encounter with a photograph of Salgado. I'm not Venders, and yet I dare to tell you about my little and modest encounter with Wim Wenders 's story of one of the most influential photographers in the world. I remember that before "The Salt of the Earth" screening started , an elderly lady sitting next to me asked me if it would be too horrifying. I was excited to say that Salgado is an outstanding photographer and his pictures are very beautiful. She was calm, she stared at the screen, but an hour later she leave the room. That's when Sebastiao talked about 210,000 dead refugees from Ethiopia.
That's what makes the movie with people who do not want to see the suffering in any form. Even the horribly beautiful Cargos of Salgado can not make them think of the nightmare that has been experiencing millions in Africa for decades. A nightmare that makes Salgado come back and again in Africa and document the life, or rather the dying, of thousands of families, a nightmare that decides that people are relentlessly cruel, and refuses to shoot. Yet his photographs, which show the dying and hungry children and adults in Ethiopia, Sudan, the Sahel, have managed to make the world finally see this inhuman terror and engage with it. And Salgado? He returns to the shooting, but his pain for the thousands of dying people he has met over the years in Africa has provoked him to plant millions of trees on his father's desolate farm in his native Brazil. Sebastião begins searching for virgin nooks around the world and discovers that they are not a small one.
"The Salt of the Earth" is a color film, but some viewers may not understand it. Wim Wenders tells the story of Salgado through his photographs, and the Brazilian world is black and white. Some, however, may seem completely colorful, because Sebastiao's black-and-white palette is infinite. And it is so intense that no one cares that Wenders is using the ordinary documentary film. Who sees this while the face of the Brazilian tells him how he saw a father throw a dead body of a son on a corpse of corpses while talking about everyday things with a friend? Wenders begins his narrative with photographs taken in a huge open gold mine, crowded with people - a place that Salgado is convinced it looks like hell. So present it. These photographs are part of his series "Workers", which was published in 1993. The following pictures, through which Wenders portrays Sebastiao's life, are Migration (2000) and Sahel: The End of the Road (2004). The photographer himself tells how he saw hunger and wars in Africa. His calm face changes for a few seconds when he recalls the circumstances in which the shattering images of death are sealed. Salgado makes us involved, and Wenders convinces us in the humanity with which the Brazilian follows his subjects at the most intimate (and lonely) moment in their lives.
So if there is a word that can describe the impact of this film, it is not death but love.
