When we first come upon the Black Woman, she is in a cage. She has no name. She is the archetypal black woman who has always been caged. As the camera draws back further and further, the screen is filled from end to end with a vast desert, with millions of glimmering stars filling up the sky. There’s not a soul around for miles. She is alone.
The woman’s grim situation is established within a few minutes. The rest of 93 minutes of The Survival Of Kindness, from Australian auteur Rolf de Heer, is a powerful, deeply affecting rumination on race and class.
It is a survival story, filled with great violence and pain. It is about the asymmetry of power: those who wield power and those who are trampled upon. The film, nearly wordless for long stretches, offers little explanation. None is needed, because where there are humans, there will always be oppression and submission. Finally, it’s about all of human existence and how, once compassion leaves the world, there’s nothing left. You may as well be dead.
In the way it’s structured, the film is almost like a three act play— the beginning, which is a discovery of the woman and her plight, the middle, where she keeps discovering more victims like her being menaced by masked gunmen who maim and kill with impunity, and the end, where there is a circling back to where she came from.
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It’s striking how the film uses silence so expressively. The masked people grunt, a woman and a man have their tongue cut out, and when people do speak, they are incomprehensible to each other. The Survival Of Kindness, in the Competition section of the 73rd Berlinale, is an allegory done right. The nameless expanse–sandy dunes, abandoned houses, large factories where humans are chained to their machines–could well be anywhere a post-apocalyptic world, brought to its knees by a virus.
De Heer, who has worked with the indigenous people in his country, has been on record about how the film was shot during the pandemic with a skeletal crew, mindful of the growing discrimination of the marginalised. Are the masks being used to filter toxic air, or to hide the faces of those carrying out bloody tasks? How long will the survivors last?
I did feel restless once or twice, but once those moments go by, you are back to the dystopia and darkness, hoping against hope. There’s something quite fitting about watching an-end-of-the-world parable play out in a film festival coming to life after two pandemic years. A young woman, badly injured but alive, left sitting by a large body of water feels like a symbol of hope. After death, there is life.
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The aptly named Blackberry is a fascinating docu-drama featuring the phone that was once the most sought-after accessory of movers and shakers around the globe. Directed by Matt Johnson, adapted from a book which tells the ‘untold story’ of the rise and mighty fall of a once-coveted piece of technology, it is also a cautionary tale about rampaging corporate greed: flying high is great, but not at the expense of humiliating your human resources.
The founders of that phone-with-a-keyboard-that-went-click were the happiest when they were behaving like kids with their toys, like your typical garage start-ups with movie nights that are sacrosanct, no suits, no dress-codes. But like all good things, it’s too good to last. The sharks start moving in, takeover monsters start sniffing around, and around the corner is the smartphone that will prove to be the smartest of them all. Once Apple comes, BB, with its USP of email-and-instant messaging on the fly– goes. There was nothing that iPhone couldn’t do.
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