The opening credits of Rolf de Heer’s The Survival of Kindness present the film’s title in various written languages, each fading into the other before the credits eventually settle on the de facto lingua franca of the world (and international film distribution): English. The impulse behind these credits is redolent of The Family of Man photography exhibition that Roland Barthes famously critiqued for its simple-minded humanism—as if an image of global togetherness can make it true—and this nearly tanks the film before it even starts.
Indeed, from its title to its messaging, one could hardly accuse this dystopic anti-colonial parable of being subtle. But there are plenty of cinematic virtues besides subtlety, and the film turns out to have no shortage of them. An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.
De Heer gives himself room to stretch his visual muscles by telling the film without intelligible dialogue. Long stretches of Survival of Kindness proceed without anyone speaking, and for the first 40 minutes or so, we only hear gibberish spilling from the mouths of the white fascists who roam the wilderness in their World War II-era gas masks, hunting Indigenous people.
At the start of the story, some of those thugs wheel the film’s protagonist (Mwajemi Hussein), referred to simply as BlackWoman in the credits, out to the middle of the Outback in a rusty cage. She’s left there to die, and de Heer makes us feel how the passage of time is reality-distorting, with time-lapse photography of the stars rotating over the woman and microscopic footage of ants at the base of her cage, locked in unfathomable battles with one another.
These breathtaking images introduce ideas of recurrence and dreaming that will be important to the film, because they’re important to Indigenous Australians. The woman in the cave manages to unscrew one side of the cage, and after escaping her prison she begins her long trek back in the direction that she came from. But it’s not the last time that we’ll see that cage.
As BlackWoman pushes forward out of the desert with silent determination, de Heer leads us to piece together the details of this world. Some kind of contagious pathogen appears to have wiped out much of the population—hence those gas masks—and the survivors have largely turned to brutality. For her part, BlackWoman shows tenderness to the corpses off of which she takes clothing and shoes, her constantly upgrading her shoes from the bodies she encounters along her way becoming one of the more endearing parts of The Survival of Kindness.
Hussein is magnetic as BlackWoman, delivering what’s in essence a pantomime performance that conveys the way that her character has become accustomed to hard-as-nails living, while retaining a matter-of-fact, sometimes almost playful defiance. There’s a practical wisdom to the way the character is in the world. Her steady way of walking and casual resourcefulness (at one point she fashions a disguise out of a discarded gas mask and some white paint harvested from fungus) make her a hero who may not be about to win any battles but is certainly indefatigable.
De Heer and cinematographer Maxx Corkindale capture the terrible beauty of BlackWoman’s world, a tranquil nature that’s often pierced by the sounds of far-off violence, and which might at any moment prove to be hiding threats. As she nears the center of the gas masks’ power, a giant industrial site where armed white aggressors enslave and torture Indigenous people, she picks up a couple allies in BrownBoy (Darsan Sharma) and BrownGirl (Deepthi Sharma), both also masquerading as whites. Though they don’t speak the same language, they rally together to hatch a plan to score at least a symbolic victory over their white oppressors.
The moment when the three of them take turns lifting their gas masks, breaking out in beaming smiles when they discover each other’s real faces, may be the crucial moment of The Survival of Kindness, as BlackWoman, BrownBoy, and BrownGirl recognize that they’re free to be themselves when together. It hardly needs to be said that the true subject here isn’t Australian society “after” a future collapse. Rather, this is a story about collapses that have already happened, the recurring apocalypses that modernity has wrought on Indigenous people. It’s our world from an estranged perspective—one that suggests that, amid all the madness, it can feel like something out of a dream when some smidgen of kindness has survived.
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