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It is probably Australia. But it could be anywhere where the sun is hot enough to bake the earth into boundless stretches of cracked crazy-paving. It is probably an alternate recent past. But it could be any period in human history when mankind has divided itself into categories of oppressor and oppressed. The most remarkable aspect of Rolf de Heer’s elegiac, elemental “The Survival of Kindness” is that it is an allegory so direct as to be obvious, told in a style so spartan as to be opaque. Not one syllable of intelligible language is spoken, but the choral anguish of generations subjugated to colonial cruelty rings loud through every wordless frame.

In a forbiddingly desolate desert landscape, shot with Dp Maxx Corkindale’s elegantly unadorned realism, the only evidence of humanity is the very definition of inhumanity: a crude iron cage in which is locked a woman (an...

In his films The Tracker, Ten Canoes and Charlie’s Country, Rolf de Heer has mixed lyrical allegory with naturalism and genre conventions, ethnographic docudrama with morality tale and Aboriginal storytelling traditions to reclaim the dignity of Indigenous Australians and decry the injustices of white colonization. The collaborative spirit of those projects — notably with the great Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, who died in 2021 — has enabled the Dutch-born writer-director to avoid charges of cultural appropriation.

His new film, The Survival of Kindness, returns to the theme of racism, this time as a minimalist tone poem entirely without intelligible dialogue, its key characters identified in the credits only as BlackWoman, BrownGirl and BrownBoy. The dystopian vision is set against harshly beautiful landscapes that are recognizably Australian yet distinctly abstract in their depiction of place and time.

The degree to which this lament for humanity connects with any audience will vary wildly. Some will...

Visionary Dutch-Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer, known for several landmark films including “Ten Canoes” and “Charlie’s Country,” is in competition at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival with “The Survival of Kindness.”

An allegory for racism, the film follows BlackWoman, who is abandoned in a cage on a trailer in the middle of the desert. She escapes and walks through pestilence and persecution, from desert to canyon to mountain to city, on a quest that leads to a city, recapture and tragedy.

Many of de Heer’s films are born with a single image in his mind. In the case of “The Survival of Kindness” this was an image of Peter Djigirr, the filmmaker’s closest Indigenous friend, who co-directed “Ten Canoes” and co-produced “Charlie’s Country” and acted in both of them, locked in a cage on a trailer abandoned in the desert.

“In the same way that the image of...

Veteran Australian director Rolf De Heer (“Ten Canoes”) is shooting a new film titled “The Mountain,” for which Italy’s Fandango Sales is launching sales at the online AFM.

“The Mountain” (pictured above in a first-look image) tells the story of a central character named BlackWoman, who is abandoned in a cage in the middle of the desert. Following her escape from the cage, “she walks through pestilence and persecution, from desert to mountain to city, to find … more captivity,” reads the film’s synopsis.

“BlackWoman walks and walks, past ruins and dunes until she finds boots, and skeletons and skulls, a wrecked world where few survive and your newly gained boots can get stolen at the point of a gun.”

“Those responsible are reluctant to release their privilege, and BlackWoman, escaping once more, must find solace in her beginnings,” it adds. The film stars Mwajemi Hussein, Deepthi Sharma, and Darsan Sharma.