Headshot of Advik Beni.
Advik Beni is a South African filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles. Through a practice steeped in South African traditions of orality, their work aims to create imagined spaces for marginalized people to express grief and trauma. They are interested in how these non-hierarchical, hybrid models of filmmaking can encourage a collective mutability amongst rhizomatic pathways—that may lead to an actuality of positive impact on communities; whilst preserving a cultural tradition eclipsed by Western modes of storytelling.
They are a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where they received an MFA in Film Directing. Their work has been supported by San Sebastián International Film Festival, Sundance, FIDMarseilles, Prismatic Ground, New Orleans Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Points North Institute, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival amongst others.
In the current climate of increased destruction, Western oppression, and genocide, Advik is focused on how we can witness each other’s existence, and all that entails, in an attempt to facilitate a tangibility of cross-border solidarity that prioritizes care.
IDA: Please tell us a little about yourself and your profession or passion.
I am a South African filmmaker and curator of Indian lineage, currently based in Los Angeles. My work focuses on the post-apartheid landscape of South Africa and the current tensions that are still rampant. I am passionate about South African traditions of orality which for me is highly anti-capitalist and encourages fluidity. I am trying to find how this ideology can be exemplified in the process of filmmaking as opposed to the product and how collective tremblement thinking in the process of making can lead to a more constructive tangible impact on communities.
IDA: When did you first start working in the non-fiction field?
At the very start of my work, I always sat on the periphery of both nonfiction and fiction. Although I can see how my work is leaning toward nonfiction, I think there is always a hybridization. Specifically, coming from a South African perspective, where the nonfiction form, historically, was always in the hands of the oppressor, the act of stretching the traditional nonfiction field is a form of self-care and radicalization.
But in a more direct sense, I think my leaning towards nonfiction came after my undergraduate experience in South Africa, which was rife with student protests. This formative experience shifted me towards ‘documenting’ or ‘witnessing’.
IDA: Your work fluidly moves between experimental, essay films, and landscape films mostly working with 16mm film. Tell us about your inspirations and some of the thoughts behind your choices around form.
My biggest inspiration around form comes from Edouard Glissant’s conceptualization of creolisation as well as my upbringing on South African orality. Glissant describes Creolisation as the ‘means by which several distinct cultures, or their elements, come into contact in a particular place in the world. It results in something unexpected, completely unpredictable, born out of the encounter of their heterogenous elements.” I think there is something about this that reflects within me. The world is mixed, entangled, intertwined and so should my work be.
In terms of orality, there is mutability. If I am orally telling a story, there is a play with those listening – it is non-hierarchical in a way. If I am telling a story and you laugh, I can choose to continue the story into that laughter or I can sharply deviate. It is not fixed in the way a film is. That is the mutability of orality that I aim to preserve in my filmmaking process. Allowing the story or ideology to shift, maneuver, and oscillate – often results in a form that is ‘mixed’.
Shooting on film, for me, is just very much a reclamation of a medium that was never used by brown and black people in the country. The physical celluloid itself is designed for white skin, so the very act of shooting black and brown skin on celluloid in South Africa is a statement I would like to hold on to.
IDA: Ilanga Alikho (The Sun is Missing) your 2022 film was shown at San Sebastián International Film Festival amongst others. Can you tell us a little about that film? What were some of the inspirations behind the work?
Ilanga Alikho is a film that deals very much with the issues that the born-free—my generation—faces. ‘Born-frees,’ as we are called, are the generation born after the end of apartheid. The film came at a time when the pressures put on this generation to repair a broken country were leading to increased apathy in the youth.
The biggest inspiration for the film is Zakes Mda's novel Ways of Dying. It is an incredible novel that follows a professional mourner traversing South Africa during the end-transitional period of apartheid. For me, Ilanga Alikho is my spiritual successor to Ways of Dying. I see the protagonist of Ilanga as the son of the professional mourner, who, after over 25 years, is still wandering, mourning, and searching for change.
IDA: Your first feature film, Mother, you have not died yet, but you will, and when you do, you will finally be alive again, is in post-production. Congratulations! How did the project start?
Mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again is a film that started as a conversation with my aunty, who is the protagonist of the film. We were talking about the current tensions in the country and how difficult it is to articulate them to one another, let alone to someone outside the landscape. Over many discussions, we started to realize that South Africa is a country that has not grieved for our excruciating history but instead put a plaster (or Band-Aid in this country?) over a bleeding wound. Thus, in 2021, in Durban – my home city, there was the largest civil unrest in the country since the end of apartheid and it was largely between Indian and Black communities.
The Indian population has often attempted to situate itself as superior to the Black population in desperate deference to the power of the white colonizer. Convenient for the ongoing regime, those who were once both subjugated turn on one another, instead of forming a kind of solidarity that could challenge the state.
Thus the film uses a reenactment of my aunty’s relationship with her mother to navigate the space the Indian population occupies in South Africa. It attempts to portray the ailments that a post-apartheid South Africa is still burdened with, by paralleling the personal grief of a daughter for her mother with the grief of a broken nation—becoming a depiction of the ways grief reimagines itself and blends into larger spheres. The way that systemic violence, grief, and displacement work through spatial and intimate relationships lies at the crux of the film.
IDA: You are also in development for your second feature Tell the Water to Pass on Our Dreams which you are co-directing with Nehal Vyas. What can you share about this work?
Nehal and I have been collaborating for a couple of years in various capacities and this film is a natural result of that. Tell the Water to Pass on Our Dreams is a film that explores the experiences of indentured laborers from India to South Africa between 1860 to 1911. It encapsulates how this event has had a lasting impact on those who were displaced, and these two nations.
The system of indenture was created by the British Colony as a response to the
labor crisis post the abolition of slavery in 1833. As a result, many Indians were shipped from India to South Africa to work on white-owned plantations, predominantly on sugar cane fields. They faced excruciating conditions and it is an often overlooked moment in history. I, for one, am a part of this indentured lineage - it is the reason my family is in South Africa. We are both to continue nurturing the film and its possibilities.