More than a portrait of a daughter caring for her dying mother, Advik Beni’s hybrid documentary uses grief and art to illuminate the layered histories of migration, memory and the fractured landscape of post-apartheid South Africa.
mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again. opens with the funeral of Lishana’s mother. A priest recites the final rites as she performs the burial rites before a sullen crowd. In that moment, it seems like Advik Beni’s documentary is going to be about grief or, at least, grief in its most familiar form: the feeling associated with loosing someone you love.
But it goes much deeper than that.
After the funeral, the documentary recedes into memory. It returns to the kitchen where Lishana learns to make roti with her mother. They laugh over fruit salad recipes. They talk about butterflies resting in the garden and how birds somehow make difficult days a little easier. It is in these quiet moments that the different dimensions showing the depths of griefs begin to unravel. It captures death and the loss of memory as two sides of the same coin. It captures how those ordinary moments; time spent with her mother in the kitchen, the jokes, the rides to places, those random conversations, become precious.
Lishana understands that these memories are worth preserving and that instinct naturally leads her back to her own artistic practice. Throughout the documentary, photography becomes more than a creative medium. It becomes another way of remembering. Looking through old photographs of her mother she admits that she can no longer tell the different between memories she genuinely possesses and those that continue to exist because they were photographed. This observation captures how photography could appear permanent, yet the memories attached to it, could be reshaped.
It is perhaps, why she turns her camera towards other people. As she begins photographing strangers, the documentary begins to question the essence of portraiture itself. One interaction, in particular, with a man who refuses to provide the familiar expectation of a smile, makes the question even louder. Why should a photography demand only happiness? Beni never answers the question, instead they let it sit.
Lishana goes further to compare her photographic adventures to those of Sanjay Kaka in the 1970s. His portraits of Black workers leaving the township in search of work documented lives that history often overlooked. His studio became more than a place to have photographs taken. It became a place where ordinary people could leave behind proof that they existed. Juxtaposed with Lishana’s own photographs of her mother dancing, cooking, cleaning methi and making jokes, the documentary suggests that photography has always done more than preserve memories. It has also been a way of resisting erasure.
As Lishana reflects on her mother, she also begins reflecting on the women who came before her. She realizes she never truly knew her grandmother; Nani, beyond the quiet years before her death. She never knew what made her laugh, what she dreamed about or the life she lived before becoming someone’s mother. Here, grief transcends into the questions never asked and the stories never passed down. This sense of inheritance soon extends beyond her immediate family to her ideas of home and identity. Growing up as part of South Africa’s Indian community, she acknowledges that she is ‘an ocean and many forgotten languages away’ yet her idea of home comes to life the things she’d carried out with her mother. The Bollywood films they watched together, the Hindi radio, the prayer and family rituals.
From there, the documentary quietly widens into the fractured landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. Newspaper clippings recalling the 1949 Durban riots sit alongside memories of the 2021 unrest. Radio broadcasts drift through everyday life. Television becomes another archive of the country’s changing reality. Through her mother’s memories, Lishana pieces together a history shaped by migration, apartheid and the uneasy relationship between Indian and Black communities. Beni never presents these histories as lessons. Instead, they emerge naturally through conversations, photographs and memories passed from one generation to the next. The capture of this archive is perhaps one of the documentary’s greatest strengths. How the ordinary collects and embodies different versions of history. Specifically the ones that history itself fails to capture.
This idea reaches its emotional peak when Lishana admits that she should know ‘how to inherit this fractured landscape and morph it into something gentler’. It is less a cry for answers than an acknowledgement that her mother, too, inherited these same fractures. Like the generations before her, she was not simply preserving culture. She was trying to survive it.
By the time the marigolds return, they no longer belong only to Lishana and her mother. They begin carrying ‘the moments of solidarity, the people’s resilience, the hums of Miriam, the words of Yusuf, the photos of Santhu’. Once symbols of an ordinary afternoon spent gardening together, they now bloom into something much larger, becoming reminders of a time when communities worked hand in hand before history and violence drove them apart.
By the end of mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again, grief no longer exists only in the loss of a mother. It lives in memory. In photographs. In rituals. In migration. In the feeling of belonging to a home carried through stories rather than geography. Through Lishana’s deeply personal journey, Advik Beni crafts a documentary that understands grief not as an ending, but as an archive, one capable of preserving love, history and identity long after the people at its center are gone.
The 37th edition of FIDMarseille runs from July 7–12, 2026.
