Advik Beni’s debut, mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again, piques your interest with its title itself and goes on to deliver on the promise of ingenuity in its precise but profound 74 minutes. No wonder it’s said that good things often come in small packages.
The South Africa-USA co-production had its world premiere at FID Marseille, one of the most significant festivals for independent cinema, renowned for championing emerging talent, supporting unique ideas and vision and platforming singular narratives and forms. mother... bagged the Audience Award and is now set to have its North American premiere at Camden International Film Festival.
Arising from a personal space—a daughter having a one way dialogue with her dead mother—it evolves into an archive of an individual and a record of an intimate mother-daughter bond. It’s also a marker of the uneasy passage of a diaspora community into finding home in a foreign land and a document of a country’s troubled political past breaking and entering its turbulent present.
Beni frames the film as a tender, aching reflection on loss and grief, drawing from the life of their own aunt Lishana Nandhlal, the protagonist and also the co-writer of the film. Residing in Cato Manor, Durban, she is the caregiver for her aging, ailing mother Leela.
Beni starts with the end—the Hindu rituals performed on the passing of Leela—and then moves back and forth in time to capture the banality of everyday routine—the praying, cooking, gardening, watching old Bollywood classics on TV and hearing their songs on FM. Indian diaspora in South Africa trying to hold on to its traditions and customs and indulging in nostalgia through food and films. And flowers, Marigold to be specific.
Beni uses a wealth of visual material—pictures, sketches, paintings, animation—and a range of spaces, from the home and the garden to the streets and shops—effortlessly moving from one to the other. Time is also fluid, past flowing into present in a never-ending loop.
The hybrid form mixes documentary elements with enactments, the collection of photographs and home videos segueing into recreated moments. While Lishana plays herself, her mother Leela comes home to us both as herself, through archival family footage, and as a character interpreted by actor Dolly Bechu.
Another striking aspect of the filmmaking is the blurring of the distinction between the real and the enacted. Beni creates a visual consistency, using the handheld, on the move camera (Super 8, 16mm) and grainy textures to give the home video feel of the recordings from the past. The editing, moving seamlessly between moments, at various points in time, lends a feeling of continuum in death. Those who have gone remain with us. Leela might be gone but Leela lives forever.
The poetic voiceover, the depth of thought and the gentle voice of Lishana, all add up in bringing alive the innards of pain and mourning. There’s the inadequacy of words in explaining the feeling but that very inability to express makes the agony tangible.
Lishana’s look inwards becomes a mode to reflect on the world outside. Her attempts at portrait photography hark back to the ones from apartheid times, with the personal getting enmeshed with the political. Beni underlines the fact that South Africa hasn’t quite healed from the brutality of discrimination. The 1949 Durban clashes between the Zulus and Indians and the unrest of 2021, described as “the country's worst episode of violence since the end of apartheid” are two sides of the same coin. The societal fractures and tensions between Indian and Black communities in South Africa persist. The agony of a nation parallels an individual’s bereavement. Grief of neither has an end. It merely shifts shape, even as Lishana yearns and hopes for harmony and solidarity--"I should know how to inherit this fractured landscape and morph it into something gentler"-- and hopes that time will come back a full circle --"A time we need to return to, when the marigold were shared between us".