Rolf De-Heer: Last News

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief A jury headed by French Vietnamese director Tranh Anh Hung awarded its Golden Goblet (Jin Jue) prizes for the Shanghai International Film Festival’s main competition. The top prize for best feature went to “The Divorce,” directed by Kazakhstan’s Daniyar Salamat. The jury praised the film for its sophisticated story-telling which mixes comedy, farce and tragedy, and “which moves fluidly from public sphere to the intimate relationship of a couple in crisis” and its feeling of innocence.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Along with a red-carpet opening ceremony, a press conference with the members of the main competition jury is a staple event of major film festivals and the 26th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival kicked off in traditional form on Friday. Along with Vietnam-French director Tran Anh Hung, previously revealed as jury president, the other members of the decisive committee this year are: Australian director and screenwriter Rolf de Heer; German director Matthias Glasner; Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka Fai; Argentinian director Santiago Mitre; Chinese director Sonthar Gyal; and, the jury’s only woman, star actor Zhou Xun. A packed audience lobbed familiar questions about the criteria they jurors would employ to decide the Golden Goblet prize winners, and what informs those views.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The inaugural edition of the Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival will be held next month (Nov. 23-29) on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Martial arts veteran Sammo Hung is to be presented with a lifetime achievement honor at the upcoming Asian Film Awards. The ceremony is back as an in-person event after a two-year absence and shifts back to Hong Kong after previously being held in Hong Kong, Macau and Busan. Hung is expected to accept the award on Sunday March 12 at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. “I’m so happy and surprised that I can still win awards these days, especially an award that affirms my entire performing career,” said Hung in a forwarded statement. He has a career as actor, action choreographer, director and producer that stretches some 60 years.

Jessica Kiang 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 amazing debut by Mwajemi Hussein), who has been left there to die. Only named in the credits as BlackWoman, she is not perhaps as alone as she first appears. Under the tires of the trailer, two columns of ants go to war. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The intersection between Black Lives Matter and a COVID-like pandemic plus a standout performance from non-professional actor Mwajemi Hussein is sure to make “The Survival of Kindness” one of Berlin’s most talked-about films. The film is deliberately obscure – the little dialog that is heard involves each performer speaking in a language of their own invention with the meaning known only to that actor and the film’s director, Australia’s Rolf de Heer. And it is minimalist. Character names are purely functional. Location filming was done with a crew of just nine people who walked extensively across Tasmania and the deserts of South Australia and cooked for each other between set-ups.

Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeck unveiled the International Competition and Encounters line-ups on Monday for the festival’s 73rd edition, running February 16 to 26.