Teboho Edkins's Short Film About His Brother's Death Heads to Netflix on 1 December
Netflix will stream an open field worldwide from 1 December. The 38-minute short film, directed by Teboho Edkins, looks at grief and mourning after the death of his brother, Max Thabiso Edkins.
Max was one of the 157 people killed in March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Passengers on that flight came from more than 30 countries. For the Edkins family, it was a personal loss, and the film follows what came after.
The Hollywood Reporter premiered the trailer on 6 November 2026, ahead of the Netflix debut. The film mixes colour and black-and-white images, and its dialogue is in English and Amharic.
The film was produced by Don Edkins and Carine Chichkowsky. Jide Akinleminu shot it, and Anne Fabini edited it. It is a co-production from South Africa, France and Germany, made by Day Zero Film and Video Productions, Day Zero Films UG and Survivance.
Its path to streaming started at festivals. an open field had its world premiere at IDFA 2025, the Amsterdam documentary festival, where it won the award for best short documentary. Festivals are where films often first meet the buyers and distributors who decide what reaches a wider audience, and this one has kept collecting attention since.
In October 2026, Deadline reported that DOC NYC, the New York documentary festival, had included the film in its 2026 short lists. The Zurich Film Festival then gave it the Golden Eye Award for Best Documentary Film. The Hollywood Reporter's Feinberg Forecast, a list of likely awards-season contenders, also named the film, pairing it with the IDFA and DOC NYC runs.
Awards lists are a separate matter from the Netflix release, and the film's place in any ceremony has not been decided. What is settled is the date. Viewers outside the festival circuit will be able to watch it from 1 December, roughly a year after its Amsterdam premiere.
For anyone who lost someone on that flight, or who follows the crash's aftermath, the release gives the story a new route into living rooms. The film's makers chose to tell it through one family's grief, not the crash itself. That choice is now in front of a far larger audience.
