FAME Week Africa Students Film Showcase 2025: Alex Ross and Hannah Clement’s “Grief” Confronts Loss and Survival

Grief  is a 12-minute short film written by Alex Ross and co-directed with Hannah Clement. Set in modern South Africa, the film explores loss, bereavement, and the struggle to preserve the legacy of a loved one who has passed away. Against a cultural backdrop that discourages speaking ill of the dead while concealing painful truths, Grief portrays the emotional weight and inner turmoil families endure in the aftermath of death.

In Grief, Bernard is left to deal with the aftermath of his mother Margaret’s death, including her mounting financial troubles. With the family home under threat of repossession due to an unpaid bank loan, Bernard nevertheless insists on hosting a memorial service, hastily inviting guests at short notice. At the gathering, his sisters Melissa and Isabella learn of the debt and the likelihood of losing their home. The memorial, which is meant to honor the deceased, ends up being a spectacle. Bernard, visibly conflicted and unstable, struggles with the right words to describe his mother, rendering a rushed and insincere tribute. “She was a good mother, was she? Sure…,” he says. The ceremony further descends into absurdity when a male guest candidly admits to having been Margaret’s lover and, in a clumsy accident, spills part of her cremains. A bank representative arrives to remind Bernard about the possibility of losing the house, before joining the other guests. Through the use of dark humor, the filmmakers trivialize and make fun of the morbidity of death.

One thing is clear with Grief’s representation of Margaret: her life, like most humans’, had a ton of imperfections. The filmmakers care enough to let us know that it is not out of place to honestly mirror and critically assess deceased people that led reckless, irresponsible lives. A similar call for posthumous accountability and assessment is evident in Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming A Guineafowl where the female protagonist speaks against his deceased uncle, a grossly irresponsible man that was a sexual predator and abuser.

The film opens and closes with fleeting ethereal moments of the seemingly happy Margaret standing in the sunset—which contrasts sharply with the tenseness and awkwardness prevalent in other scenes. As the children of the deceased come to terms with their current realities, the unavoidable path of starting all over, they laugh even as they dispose of what is left of their mother’s cremains. Their laughter is a symbolic gesture of strength, resilience, an undying attitude towards life even in the face of unease. They do not say much for any one to figure out what their next line of action would be, yet their will to survive against the odds remains palpable. At the end of the day, Grief seems to say with its filmic reticence, what matters is strength to bounce back from setbacks and forge ahead in life is all that matters.