Mother you have not died yet, but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again, mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again.

The film began as a series of conversations with Lishana, my aunty. Initially, the idea of it being a film wasn’t the intention at all. Leela, Lishana’s mother, was still with us then. She was a pillar of the community. Her kitchen was a space for the community—people moved through it constantly, a kind of centre of gravity. And the conversations I was having with Lishana were really just conversations between an aunt and nephew. About life, about South Africa, about the Indian diaspora in Durban, about what it means to carry something as enormous and unresolved as our history while also just… cooking, watching television, tending a garden.

What I kept returning to was this question: how do you explain post-apartheid South Africa to those not from this land? Its history is so recent and so present. The wounds aren’t historical in the way people outside might imagine. They’re not sutured; they’re still open, still bleeding into the everyday. And yet there’s enormous pressure, both internal and external, to have moved on. To perform recovery. That tension—between the wound and the veil placed over it—felt like the thing I needed to find a form for.

Then Leela passed. She contracted COVID during the 2021 riots, and hospitals were overwhelmed and unavailable to most. After that, Lishana began writing. Grief does something to language: it strips it, makes it more precise and also more uncontainable. Much of her voice-over throughout the film is adapted from poetry she wrote. These poems then entered our ongoing conversations and around this time, I started weaving these ideas together as a film. When I read them, I recognised something that no interview or observational footage could have arrived at alone. A particular quality of interiority that comes from grief working through language, and from language beginning to fail, then finding its own way through that failure.

So we began a collaboration based first on trust. Lishana trusting that her private texts could become something public, and me being accountable to that trust. We workshopped the material together, not in any academic sense, but through performance. As an aunt and nephew, we also have a relationship that allowed this play to happen organically. She would speak and I would listen. We would send each other different variations of the same text over voice notes, which would sometimes move into her dinner plans, what she was watching on TV, or a concert I had been to recently.

There’s also something important to say about what it means to make someone both a subject and an author. Documentary has so often extracted from its subjects, taking their stories and returning very little agency over what becomes of them. So I was drawn to finding an alternate model, where the work is truly grounded in collaboration. Without her authorship and writing, the film wouldn’t exist as it does, and I am immensely grateful to her for her trust and imagination.

The word “you” holds a particular kind of weight for me. It collapses distance. When Lishana speaks to her mother, to the audience, to the nation, which are sometimes the same gesture, she’s using “you” as an act of direct address, a refusal to let the other become abstract. I was thinking about South African orality, the oral traditions at the centre of how stories move here. There’s no clean separation between the teller and the told, between the past and present tense. The anaphora became a way for me to reclaim these oral traditions and its repetition acts as insistence.

The five-act structure came from thinking about grief’s cyclicality. Grief doesn’t resolve. It returns, changes shape, folds back on itself. And I felt that mirrored something about communal grief too, the grief South Africa has never been permitted to work through collectively. The forgive-and-forget policies of the transitional period after 1994 were important to the democratic transition, but they deferred something enormous. What we’re living with now is the consequence of that deferral. The structure needed to hold that cyclicality, not build towards a resolution that doesn’t exist.

Each act begins in the lived, embodied world of Lishana and her mother and moves outward into the essay-animation sequences, where personal grief opens onto the national. I didn’t want those two registers, the intimate and the political, to be cleanly separate. I wanted them to bleed into each other, the way they do in life.

One thing about my family is that we love to document. So when I started researching Lishana and Leela’s life together, I was bombarded (through various WhatsApp family chats!) with an overwhelming amount of old photos, Nokia phone videos from the early 2000s, a distant cousin’s wedding videos, Mother’s Day cards, school graduation photos, and I knew I wanted to keep that energy in the film. So, in a way, making this film was never about arriving with a predetermined framework and populating it with materials. It was more like living inside a question and seeing what arrived. The live action sequences were shot over one summer, but the archival essay sequences were slowly and simultaneously crafted with Nehal, my producer and animator, alongside the editing process, so there was always a mutability.

The family photographs were already in the house, on the walls, in albums, pressed between things. They had a particular texture, a way of existing in time. Alongside those, the apartheid-era portrait photography: work made by photographers who were doing something quietly subversive, using portraiture as a mode of honouring Black people within a system that treated them as invisible or threatening or both. Lishana’s photography practice in the film inherits from that tradition, consciously and also instinctively. Her own portraits exist in an off-screen dialogue with the archival portraits, not as illustration but as conversation across time.

The Cato Manor community is a cornerstone of apartheid and post-apartheid tensions, and much of the film’s cinematic language comprises archives capturing this historic site over time. These materials become the substrate for the animation sequences, where the Oxberry and optical printer allow us to work directly on the film itself—pressing flower petals, blood, torn photographs, etching into the surface of an old Bollywood song. This was the exciting part, really—to see how we could dissociate these images from their physicality and push them into abstraction. In our animation sequences, we wanted to create an ancestral space, where worldly things begin to dissolve, where the membrane between the living and the dead becomes permeable.

I was wary of making a film that explained South Africa. That positioned the viewer as someone outside, looking in at a history being narrated for their benefit. That kind of film already exists in abundance, and it tends to flatten what it claims to illuminate.

What interested me more was what it feels like to live inside this history, to have it not as background but as atmosphere, the texture of ordinary days. The 1949 riots and the 2021 unrest are not context in this film. They’re presence. So the historical reference points are sparse precisely because the history is already everywhere, in the way we move through space, in what we leave unsaid.

I also think there’s something important about not over-explaining the Indian community’s position within South Africa. It’s a position of enormous complexity, subjugated under apartheid, and yet also implicated, in ways that are uncomfortable and necessary to acknowledge, in the perpetuation of racial hierarchies. Gandhi’s writing is a record of that complicity. The Indian, neither Black nor white, has often attempted to situate oneself as superior to the Black population, in desperate deference to the power of the white coloniser. Even once that colonial system ceded explicit control, the violence it inflicted remained embedded in social conceptions of natural hierarchy. Those who were once both subjugated turn on one another, instead of forming the solidarity that could actually challenge the state. I didn’t want the film to smooth over that history. I wanted it to sit in that discomfort, because I think discomfort is where something true lives.

South Africa never had a healthy process of grief following the atrocities of apartheid. A sense of faux strength and numbness had to veil the nation in order for its people to survive the transition. But the veil doesn’t heal the wound. These wounds still bleed. And the film tries to be honest about that, not to resolve it, but to make it visible.

Most of the spaces in the film are ones I’ve known my whole life. This mattered to me enormously, not just as a biographical footnote but as a methodological one. Because this is the Durban I know, the Durban I carry with me wherever I go.

The barbershop is my family’s. It’s been in the family for nearly 100 years. The community that moves through that space already has a relationship with us, with me. The home is Lishana and Leela’s home, where we’ve spent countless days and nights, surrounded by our extended family. I remember being a little kid, sitting on a faded red plastic stool, while Leela cooked her famous chicken curry. So when we started filming, the camera wasn’t arriving to extract something. It was arriving at something familiar, even if it changed the room a little.

Both locations, the home and the barbershop, are intricate platforms to navigate the personal and the performative simultaneously. In the home, we’re watching Lishana in the most intimate register: caring for her mother, cooking, praying, moving through rituals of a life shaped entirely around another person’s needs. In the barbershop, there’s a different kind of performance, the way people present themselves when they know they might be seen, and the power dynamic in that exchange, between the one who looks and the one who is looked at.

What connects both spaces, for me, is that oral culture lives inside them. Stories move without being announced. In South African oral tradition, the space between past, present and future is permeable. Orality merges those registers; it gives expression to collective memories amassed over time. It is a living reality, created while being performed in front of an audience. The barbershop is full of voices overlapping, stories half-finished, histories refracted through the present moment. The home carries that too, the TV running silently, Lishana and her mother reciting lines from films they’ve seen a hundred times. Both spaces resist the idea of a single authoritative voice. They’re communal, even in their intimacy.

Stringing these two worlds together is the ancestral realm, a space believed in many South African cultures to be where our ancestors go after passing. Where Leela has already gone in reality, and where the film allows her to go again. In this space, Lishana is both overwhelmed by grief and freed into a more direct voice. She can speak without the constraints of ordinary time, or ordinary grief.

Shooting on celluloid in South Africa is a political statement before it’s an aesthetic one. Historically, film wasn’t available to our people. The medium was used by upper-class white South Africans, and only they could represent themselves, or worse, us, through it. Even amateur formats like Super 8, on which much of the film is shot, were brought into South Africa by colonisers.

And beyond access to a camera, film itself was initially created for white skin. The way celluloid exposes, the way it renders skin, was calibrated for whiteness. Its chemistry was a choice. So when we shoot on this format now, we’re doing something that is itself an act of reclamation. The grain, the texture, the way light falls on brown skin in these images: that’s not nostalgia. It’s insistence.

Super 8 in particular carries a look of temporal disparity, which I love. A modern work shown via older, highly textured technologies elicits the film’s themes directly: the cyclicality of events, the return of the past, the way memory accumulates and distorts. The texture of Super 8 is itself an argument about time.

The handheld approach comes from wanting to be inside life rather than observing it from a distance. Long takes, a micro-crew, one camera and a sound recordist, minimal equipment. Sound works alongside image here: four microphones for each scene, recording sounds in and outside the frame, capturing off-screen dialogue, building a larger sense of space than the frame alone can hold.