Express at Berlinale: The Survival of Kindness is an allegory done right

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Key Points

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..

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...

In the way its 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...

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..

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...

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