Coming Back to Life: New Films by Advik Beni and Pierre Creton
Michael Sicinski reviews the debut feature by newcomer Advik Beni and the latest short film by veteran Pierre Creton, which coalesce around matters of life, death, and creation.
Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally Be Alive Again — Advik Beni
Seemingly participating in a new trend of grandiloquent, marquee-busting film titles that includes the Mosotho drama Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You and the latest installment of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie (subtitled Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift; a Fragmentary Passage), the title of Advik Beni’s debut feature — Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally Be Alive Again. — is surprisingly literal in its meaning. It begins with footage from the funeral of the protagonist’s mother, and then goes back in time to show the two of them interacting prior to her death. What’s more, Beni is a Hindu South African, descended from Indian indentured workers. So in the linear sequence of the film, the titular mother is “alive again,” but she will also presumably be reincarnated.
Beni’s film is a fiction/documentary hybrid, combining extemporaneous footage of Beni’s mother in home movies with reenactments performed by onscreen actors. The core of the film is the relationship between a daughter, Lishana (Lishana Nandhlal), and her mother, Leela (Dolly Bechu). One refrain throughout is Lishana chopping and piling wood, which we eventually understand is for her mother’s funeral pyre. But Mother is also an open-form essay film, addressing the history of Indian immigrants living in Durban township, their liminal position between whites and Blacks during the Apartheid regime, and the simmering historical tensions that boil over even in the present day.
