A documentary by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. In French, English, and Portuguese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

With all the chaos and destruction in the world, you’d expect to see more pictures like those of Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer who came to worldwide attention around 1980 with his black-and-white panoramas of mud-covered gold miners in northern Brazil. But aside from his purely monochrome aesthetic, Salgado’s distinction is the amount of mud he’s willing to wear.

For this Oscar-nominated documentary, famed German director Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) worked with the photographer’s French-born son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, to explore a career that inspires admiration, and fear for the planet. They sketch out the rough biography of a man who was born 71 years ago on a cattle farm in the mining region of Minas Gerais and trained as an economist. His work soon brought him to Africa, which became the source of his most searing work as his experiences there triggered a transition to photography. Fleeing Brazil’s military dictatorship in the early 1970s, Salgado and wife Lélia settled in Paris, where they had children and began publishing his photo books.

The narration here is largely in French, with comments coming from the surprisingly youthful Salgado, his hairless face often mirrored in large silver prints. We also catch glimpses of his younger self, with long, blond hair and bushy red beard, embedded with tribal people in Ecuador and Mexico. (He was often gone for years at a time, and there’s no discussion of how his marriage survived.)

Salgado shows up less in his later images of starving, harried people in mass exodus from Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the then-Yugoslavia. The film’s middle section—riddled with corpses, dust, and decay—is a harrowing catalogue of human cruelty. The saving grace is the sculptural, almost medieval aura of his photos, allowing necessary distance. In fact, after a lifetime of capturing horror, the photographer went in search of undiscovered beauty and participated in the replanting of millions of trees on his family’s land.

This Earth contains much salt, but also some sweetness.