We long for kindness in The Survival of Kindness, a particularly cruel and radical dystopia by Rolf de Heer, presented on Friday in the official competition of the Berlinale. “There is a lot of kindness in the world, but we run the risk of losing it,” the Australian filmmaker said at a press conference on Friday. It touches me when someone is nice. I have come to expect the opposite. »
The Survival of Kindnessan enigmatic metaphor inspired by the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, has overtones of The road, the famous novel by Cormac McCarthy, 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 story, whites specifically hunt blacks and aboriginals, who are caged, stoned, shot.
The filmmaker’s most recent filmAlexandra’s Project and of Charlie’s Country begins with the strong image of a cake on which we have re-enacted a scene of the massacre of black slaves by an extreme right-wing militia. After eating it, men wearing gas masks transport a black woman into the desert and leave her to her fate, in a padlocked cage.
The survival instinct will allow this prisoner to face the arid and inhospitable territory that surrounds her, as well as all these armed men who kill at close range everything they do not consider to be white. On her way, she will meet many corpses hanging from trees, men suffering from smallpox and survivors of sexual violence.
“When people are discriminated against, those in power do not see how they suffer,” recalled Mwajemi Hussein, the non-professional actress who plays the lead role, her very first, on Friday at a press conference. This Congolese refugee has lived in Australia for 17 years, where she is a social worker, and had never been to the cinema before being chosen by Rolf de Heer. She is practically in every scene and bursts the screen with her expressions of dismay.
The Survival of Kindness, shot with a small crew in the deserts of South Australia and Tasmania, has no intelligible dialogue. Only grunts, and a few monologues in invented languages. When I told you it was radical…
A reporter asked Rolf de Heer, who often shot with Indigenous actors, if a wealthy middle-class white man was best suited to tell this story. “I ask myself the question every time I make a film, replied the 71-year-old filmmaker at a press conference. The director’s job is to understand a variety of people. I believe I am as qualified to do it as anyone. At the end of the day, it’s as much a white story as it is a black story. Whoever tells the story must understand both sides of it. »