Salt of the Earth, a new documentary about the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, was a real highlight of this year’s festival.

Co-directed by his son Juliano and Wim Wenders, it shows how Salgado has moved from an engaged activist-photographer of specific injustices and suffering communities, through recognition and celebration of manual labour to a visionary and globalised awareness of a shared, socialised human existence within a pristine natural world, suffused with compassion and peace.

His photographs — all black and white — look tremendous on the big screen. Monumental and compassionate compositions, they reveal an almost sculptural use of light and space.

They focus on the creativity, resilience and dignity of their subjects as they labour, suffer and survive in the most desperate circumstances, whether that be struck by famine in the Sahel, wounded in war-torn Yugoslavia or fighting back against expropriation in the vast Brazilian agricultural estates.

After covering the dreadful death frenzy in the Rwanda conflict during the 1990s Salgado fell ill as a consequence of witnessing terrible violence.

He turned to nature photography and the massive collection of images in the Genesis series is a homage to unspoilt wildernesses around the world — the icy wastes of the Antarctic, the exuberant jungles of Madagascar, the thick forests of the Amazon basin and the isolated, ancient human communities that survive in them.

These photographic and environmental projects Salgado and his wife Leila support in the Amazon should not be interpreted as a retreat from radical politics, however.

The film makes it clear that the images in Genesis are a commemoration of our natural world but they also express a kind of yearning, if not a prefigurement, of an ecologically aware, peaceful communism. “It’s a problem of sharing, not a natural catastrophe,” as Salgado has said.

There were two outstanding films in the festival about the Cultural Revolution and its impact on recent Chinese history.

On the surface, Red Amnesia appears to be a simple and sad story of a widow coping with telephone harassment.

But gradually it unfolds into a thriller with a strong political subtext, as an older generation’s guilty secrets about events in the Cultural Revolution are unwillingly excavated by a younger generation anxious to forget their parents and their past.

It’s a brave, layered and mysterious film which, like Michael Haneke’s Hidden, reveals its truths gradually and unexpectedly and has a brilliant central performance by Lu Zhong as the elderly woman Deng Meijuan.

Coming Home is the latest from Zhang Yimou, director of classics Red Sorghum and Ju Dou and, like those films, it shows the impact of political events on personal lives.

It tells the story of a college teacher, sent away for “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution, whose wife is left to bring up their daughter.

Upon his return, the possibilities for reconciliation prove dauntingly difficult — a poignant and emotionally charged metaphor for China’s attempt to come to terms with a disturbing recent past.