Content warning: starvation, child death, animal death (tribesmen shoot monkeys with arrows), genocide
Okay, so those are objectively terrible things to warn you about but you should make time to see this documentary if you can. And as an aside, fuck the MPAA that gave this a PG-13 for nudity but didn't mention all of the corpses.
Photographer Sebastiao Salgado has spent a lifetime behind the camera, traveling the world to capture intimate portraits of humanity at its humblest, most vulnerable, and forgotten. Gold miners in Brazil, flood-displaced Nigerians, famine-stricken Ethiopians, and the victims of genocide in Yugoslavia, Congo, and Rwanda. The last sickened him so much he retreated to his family farm in Brazil, now a wasteland of erosion. His wife, Lelia, came up with the radical idea of replanting the Matá Atlantica, the Atlantic rain forest that had been cut down for cattle grazing. Two million trees later and Salgado was inspired to create a photo project documenting pockets of hope, places around the globe that still retained their natural, almost primeval state.
Wenders is already one of the most empathetic filmmakers. His sense of humanism, of the capacity for joy, and his sensitivity with his subjects is matched and hightened by Salgado's bottomless reserves of empathy. As a person who struggles with even identifying emotions, much less expressing them, seeing the depths of feeling on display in this film was nothing less than revelatory. It is delicate and powerful all at once.
It's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon. If you need to remember that all hope is not lost, give it a try.
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