The Survival of Kindness

The film has an experimental, minimalist style that almost completely eschews dialogue. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world apparently devastated by a virus, in which an overclass of white survivors (who wear protective gas masks) is committing genocide against people of other races (this being an allegory for racism, especially against Indigenous people in Australia). The protagonist, referred to as "BlackWoman" in the credits (her name is not mentioned in the film) is captured, locked in a cage, and abandoned in the middle of a desert. She eventually breaks out and walks through the desert, seeking revenge against her captors. The desert transpires to be a corpse-strewn wasteland populated by drifters and scavengers, one of whom steals BlackWoman's shoes at gunpoint. Eventually, she reaches a ghost town where she gathers supplies at an abandoned museum. She continues her journey through a forest, where she witnesses a variety of disturbing sights such as lynched corpses and fleeing refugees harried by snipers. She finds a gas mask and disguises herself as white, but when she reaches a town, she is accosted and found out by a gun-wielding thug. A pair of similarly disguised South Asian teenagers (referred to as "BrownGirl" and "BrownBoy" in the credits) save her and take her to an abandoned rail depot where they live. They agree to help her, and the three travel to an industrial zone that apparently serves as her captors' seat of power but are quickly captured and separated. BlackWoman is enslaved and forced to work in a scrapyard but manages to escape. Returning to the rail depot, she discovers that the boy and girl have also escaped but are critically injured. Leaving the boy, she walks with the girl to a lake; after a brief conversation, the girl dies from her injuries the next day. In despair, BlackWoman retraces the steps of her journey, discarding the clothes and supplies she found on the way. Finally, she reaches the cage, climbs back in, and dies. (In the last scene, the cage's broken door is shown repaired. This leaves open the possibly that her odyssey may have been imagined, but this ending is ambiguous.) ==Cast==

• Mwajemi Hussein (BlackWoman) • Deepthi Sharma (BrownGirl) • Darsan Sharma (BrownBoy) • Gary Waddell • Natasha Wanganeen ==Production==

The film is produced by Julie Byrne and Rolf de Heer under the banner of Triptych Pictures and Vertigo Productions, and bankrolled by Screen Australia, Screen Tasmania, Adelaide Film Festival, and South Australian Film Corporation. Umbrella Entertainment is taking care of distribution in Australia. Elise Archer, Minister for the Arts, Tasmania, wrote on her website, "We have invested $90,000 in the film (The Survival of Kindness), through Screen Tasmania, which was filmed in both Tasmania and South Australia. == Release ==

The Survival of Kindness had its world premiere at Adelaide Film Festival on 23 October 2022. It had its international premiere in competition at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on 17 February 2023, where it competed for Golden Bear and won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Film. The film was selected in country focus section 'Best of Contemporary Australian Cinema' at the 29th Kolkata International Film Festival and will be screened on 6 December 2023. ==Reception==

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes website, the film has an approval rating of 83% based on 18 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on 6 reviews, indicating "Generally Favorable Reviews". David Rooney, reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter at Berlin Film Festival, praised the performance of Mwajemi Hussein, writing, "Hussein’s unflinching performance speaks volumes, mostly without words". Rooney found the film rather too lengthy: "there’s a grim inevitability to The Survival of Kindness that becomes wearing, making its 96 minutes feel longer." Calling it an outback gothic, he stated, "Some will find it immersive and others distancing; many will find it unrelentingly bleak, even infuriating in its ability to be simultaneously opaque and obvious." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film with 3 stars out of 5 and wrote, "It is an elegant reverie about the violence and the stoicism beneath the surface of ordinary life." Wendy Ide for ScreenDaily wrote that the filmmaking is "striking, thought-provoking, although it rather runs out of steam and ideas in the third act." Pat Brown for Slant Magazine rated 2.5 out of 4 and praised Hussein as "magnetic as BlackWoman". Brown opined, "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." ==Accolades==