A movie tip for this Sunday: The Survival Of Kindness, This is the title of the new film by Rolf de Heer, an Australian filmmaker who has distinguished himself in recent years by casting Aboriginal actors. This time, he directs an actress from the Democratic Republic of Congo in a totally unclassifiable film, rewarded at the last Berlin film festival where he won the international critics’ prize.
At the origin of this new film, there is a heady vision that obsesses director Rolf de Heer. “ It was the image of a friend of mine, Aboriginal actor Peter Djiggir, locked in a cage on a trailer and left to die in the desert. Why this image ? I know absolutely nothing about it. So I have this opening image, I have this pandemic period in mind. And then I was horrified by the statements of certain Western politicians who were delighted that Covid was killing black people and people of color. And that leads me to this film. »
The 72-year-old Australian filmmaker keeps the image of a black being in a cage, but it will ultimately be a woman who plays the lead role in his 16th film. An unclassifiable work, between western, road movie on foot or a horror film, where the fifty-year-old heroine, who has managed to free herself from her cage, wanders in a post-apocalyptic universe whose mechanisms we do not know.
“ The crisis transcends racial divides. We gradually learn that we must wear a gas mask to stay alive. But racialized people are not allowed to wear them otherwise they will be killed. »
A film driven by the experience of its main actress
This wordless film relies heavily on the presence of the main performer. Mwajemi Hussein is not, however, a professional actress. But Rolf de Heer detected in her a strength linked to her past.
“ She was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and was raped at 13 years old by an uncle with whom she became pregnant. She was sent to another village, but upon her return her father was killed for not revealing where she was. Then the war broke out, and after a thousand adventures, she lived with her six children for eight years in a refugee camp in Tanzania. So her life is filled with misfortune, and it is this humanity that she expresses so well in the film. »
We can consider the title of this film, The Survival Of Kindness (The survival of kindness), as ironic. Or take it at face value. In any case, Rolf de Heer recounts that when his main actress, marked by years of torment in the Congo and then in a refugee camp, heard this title, she burst into tears as it echoed her own survival.
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