Talking about death: how a father and brother found solace in the ‘living graveyard’ of an airline disaster

The film-maker Don Edkins lost his son Max in 2019, in the Ethiopian Airline crash that killed 157 people. With Max’s brother Teboho, he has made a documentary, not about the crash, but about their mourning

It was, says Teboho Edkins, “a film I didn’t want to make”. On 10 March 2019, Edkins’ brother, Max, was among the 157 people killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa airport.

For Teboho, making a documentary about the disaster seemed impossible: “It’s not a sexy subject. At first, I really didn’t want to do it at all.”