We’ve been looking for kindness for a long time in The Survival of Kindness, a particularly gruesome and radical dystopia by Rolf de Heer, presented in Friday’s Berlinale Official Competition. “There is a lot of kindness in the world, but we risk losing it,” the Australian filmmaker told a news conference on Friday. It touches me when someone is nice. I came to expect the opposite. »
Posted at 8:30 p.m
An enigmatic metaphor inspired by the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, The Survival of Kindness echoes Cormac McCarthy’s famous novel The Road, but without the futuristic post-apocalyptic aspect. Here, too, villages have been abandoned and dehumanized citizens are trying to save their skins. In this uchronic tale, whites specifically hunt blacks and natives who are imprisoned, stoned, and shot.
Filmmaker Alexandra’s Project and Charlie’s Country’s latest film opens with a powerful image of a cake re-enacted as the scene of the massacre of black slaves by far-right militia. After eating it, men in gas masks carry a black woman into the desert and abandon her to her fate in a padlocked cage.
Survival instinct will allow this captive to face the arid and inhospitable territory that surrounds them, as well as all those gunmen who will kill anything they don’t think is white at point-blank range.
On her way she encounters many corpses hanging from trees, men suffering from smallpox and survivors of sexual violence.
“When people are discriminated against, those in power don’t see how they suffer,” Mwajemi Hussein, the non-professional actress who plays the lead, her first, recalled at a news conference on Friday. The Congolese refugee has been a social worker in Australia for 17 years and had never been to the cinema before being chosen by Rolf de Heer. She’s practically in every scene, bursting the screen with her dismayed remarks.
Filmed with a small crew in the deserts of South Australia and Tasmania, The Survival of Kindness lacks intelligible dialogue. Just grunts and a few monologues in made-up languages. When I told you it was radical…
A reporter asked Rolf de Heer, who often worked with Indigenous actors, if a wealthy, middle-class white man would be best suited to tell the story. “I ask myself that question every time I make a film,” the 71-year-old filmmaker replied at a press conference. The director’s task is to understand countless people. I think I’m just as qualified for this as anyone. At the end of the day, it’s both a white story and a black story. Whoever tells the story must understand both sides. »