By Stephanie Bunbury

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When Mwajemi Hussein first met Rolf de Heer, director of such landmark Australian films as Bad Boy Bubby and The Tracker, to discuss playing the lead role in his new film, she had never even been to a cinema. Hussein came to Australia with her family after escaping the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and spending eight years in a refugee camp in Tanzania. She spoke no English when she arrived in Adelaide 18 years ago and, as a social worker, lived largely within the African community.

“I never knew what would happen,” she told a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Survival of Kindness had its world premiere to great acclaim. “I have a family and many children and I never know how it would be to act, but I went and I thought, ‘Well, let’s go and see.’ I always jump in, because I believe in challenges.”

Mwajemi Hussein in The Survival of Kindness. Credit:Photo: Murray RehlingCopyright: Triptych Pictures and Vertigo Productions

The Survival of Kindness traverses several Australian landscapes that De Heer says were his first subject, subsequently overlaid with a mythic story of survival. Hussein’s character, simply called BlackWoman, escapes from a cage dumped in the South Australian desert and sets out to save herself, walking to what eventually becomes mountain country in Tasmania. Of course, that is impossible, but the logistics of real travel – including finding water and food, which would be her priorities in the real world – are not relevant here. Her life depends on hiding from authority – screeching paramilitary figures in robotic masks – along with other victims and dissidents she encounters in this unnamed but clearly malevolent armed state.

The film is powerful despite the fact that – or perhaps because – nothing is explained. Even the dialogue is withheld from us; it was written in English, but each actor delivers it in her or his own version of a nonsense language.

“Anyone can make any story from this movie,” says Hussein. She reads it in a way that clearly reflects her own experience. “The story says to me that BlackWoman was brave, she was kind. It says having courage is very important, having extreme hope is very important. And that when you don’t have options, you go with what you have.”

De Heer originally wrote the script for Peter Djigirr, who had played leading roles in his earlier films Ten Canoes – which he also co-directed – and Charlie’s Country, both shot in Djigurr’s country in Arnhem Land. De Heer was driving around his own home turf in Tasmania, looking for locations that would be, as he puts it, “COVID-nimble”, when an image of Djigirr sprang unannounced into his mind.

“It was him in this cage in the desert, locked in,” he says. “I know him well and what he can express with his face, his acting, you know. It wouldn’t go away and it seemed to want to be the beginning of the film.” He called the character BlackMan, wrote the script and gathered the finance.

Then Djigirr couldn’t do it. Time was tight. De Heer approached an organisation for refugees in Tasmania to ask if any Black men there might be interested in working on a film. The person who most sparked his interest, however, was an Ethiopian woman. Did they know “somebody with these qualities, but a man”? It was only as he was walking to his car that he thought that perhaps the same script would work with a woman. “It was a difficult jump to make but, having had that thought, I thought, ‘This is interesting’.” Ultimately, that mental leap took him to Mwajemi Hussein.

Rolf de Heer with Mwajemi Hussein during filming.Credit:Murray Rehling. Copyright: Triptych Pictures and Vertigo Productions

Hussein is a remarkable presence, on screen and in the flesh. Even at school, while living with friends of her father’s after he was killed in the war, she was mocked for her determination. “Because the area was not encouraging women or girls to study; once you are 15 or 16, depending on the body’s performance, that is the time to get married,” she says. “But I had something in me pushing me to study. I was really bullied a lot: we say in Swahili, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ But I survived. And I was educated.” She escaped that village with her husband and three children by walking to Lake Tanganyika and crossing on a rowboat, a slow sitting target for 11 hours, before reaching relative safety.

She is now 52, a mother of seven and so fit that the young crew on The Survival of Kindness had trouble keeping up with her on their long walks to location. At home in Adelaide, she sometimes walks barefoot “because it reminds me of where I come from and the struggle I went through”, she says. In times of stress, she hikes around Mt Lofty, walking barefoot down a rocky path to a river.

“It’s very difficult, but I know what I’m doing. I want to say something to connect myself to my ancestors. I want to say something to bring them to me. This is the connection I feel between the film and myself. I was acting but also enjoying the things I really connect to. I grew up drinking water direct from the river, so when I am in the film and drink water from a river I am acting, but inside myself I am talking to my ancestors as well.”

De Heer has made some of his most significant work with Indigenous artists, building on his close relationship with the late David Gulpilil, but any involvement by white filmmakers in telling Indigenous stories is now regarded as problematic. The Survival of Kindness is not an Indigenous story, but it raises similar questions; a journalist in Berlin asks whether he felt he was the right person to tell the story of a Black woman.

Mwajemi Hussein and Rolf de Heer at the Berlin Film Festival.Credit:AP

“I have doubt about every film I make,” he replies. “Whether I’m the right person to make it. At the same time, a director’s and writer’s job is to understand a range of people, their background, where they come from and what that is, so at that level I think I’m as qualified as anybody is.”

Qualified, but possibly unacceptable. He accepts that, however reluctantly. “I thought, for 20 years at least, that the time is coming when Black people will be telling their own stories and it will be almost impossible for someone like me to make an indigenously themed film,” he says. “And I’ve welcomed the thought of that time coming, because it will have meant that some fantastic progress would have been made … We almost have to go through this period of time to get somewhere new. And we need to be somewhere new from where we used to be.”

But there is no question that for Mwajemi Hussein, making The Survival of Kindness has been empowering, affirming and a terrific adventure. When she first discussed it with her family, she says, she worried about what would happen if she failed.

“Coming back to the struggle for me as a Black person, I think if I destroy someone’s thing, what will happen to me? Am I going to have to pay?” she remembers. But seeing De Heer prepared to take a risk on her, she took a risk herself. “And I think now, why should I not act? It’s the first time I acted, first time in Europe,” she says. “Everything is possible if we give people who are struggling a chance.”

The Survival of Kindness opens nationally on May 4. Q&A screenings with Rolf De Heer and Mwajemi Hussein will be held at the Sydney Fantastic Film Festival, April 21, the Gold Coast International Film Festival, April 23, and Melbourne’s Cinema Nova on April 30.

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