The Salt of the Earth (also released under the French title Le sel de la terre) is a 2014 internationally co-produced biographical documentary film directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.

The film traces 40 years of Salgado's work, which took him from South America to Africa, Europe, the Arctic, and back home to Brazil, and focuses on international conflicts, starvation and exodus, and natural landscapes, both pristine and in decline.

[13] Feeling homesick, but not yet able to return to Brazil, for his first major multi-year project Sebastião traveled around other parts of the Americas, where he spent time among and photographed the people and their circumstances.

He documented the famine in Ethiopia (which he refers to as a problem of distribution, not just a natural disaster), spending time at the largest ever refugee camps and witnessing some of the innumerable deaths that occurred there from hunger, cholera, and cold.

Inspired by the revitalization of his family land, Sebastião decided to do another big photographic project, this time to document pristine landscapes and wildlife, as well as human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions, such as the Zo'é, who did not come into contact with the modern world until the late-1980s, and the Yali.