“Lemohang Mosese, in his third feature film, “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” offers a touching tribute to his mother and his homeland. The Lesotho-born director expresses his longing for his mother who was in Europe during part of his childhood, and for his homeland, from which he feels estranged as an adult living in Europe. This film is not just an ode to cinema; it is cinema itself, rich in imagery and stimulation, inviting the audience to form their own interpretations of the audiovisual experience.
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The sound aspect of the film primarily revolves around the monologue, complemented by Diego Noguera’s edgy metallic score and sound design. The words of Mosese, both poetic and densely essayistic, provide viewers with numerous story and theme hints, but they sometimes have an abstract, if any, connection to the exceptional symbolism-loaded scenes on the screen. At times, the text becomes so literary and embellished that Mosese himself stumbles as the narrator.
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The film blends autobiographical musings with third-person inventions, and incorporates elements of documentary, fiction, and art installation. It explores Mosese’s personal sense of alienation as an African artist living in Berlin and the broader, ongoing evolution of his home continent. The few silent parts of the film provide welcome moments of reflection.
Compared to its predecessor, the more accessible and narrative-focused “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” from 2020, this film is less accessible due to its verbal intensity. Nonetheless, after its prominent premiere in this year’s Berlinale Special section, festival curators and distributors with a taste for experimentation will likely be attracted to the film’s sensory and political power. The film’s rhetorical profusion could even be seen as a clear projection of a Black voice that has been marginalized for too long.
A recurring image throughout the film is a long piece of crimson fabric, its exact hue and texture shimmering under the southern African sun, spread out over the rugged Lesotho landscape like a Christo installation. The fabric appears to symbolize both the bloodshed that has marked the country’s history and the ongoing violence within its borders today.
The fabric at one point leads directly to Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a silent character based on a real woman who was killed by a vengeful mob of her fellow Basotho people in 1991 after she failed to notice her child shoplifting in a local store. In another scene, the ominous ribbon comes from the shell of a wrecked BMW 325iS, a car model associated with gang terror in the region.
Mosese projects his own feelings and worries about his homeland onto two human figures: Manthabiseng and Sobo (Sobo Bernard playing a version of himself), a sidewalk puppeteer and herbalist Mosese met upon returning to Lesotho. Sobo’s performances and remedies aim to educate and heal his fellow citizens, a gesture that may induce some guilt in Mosese, who feels out of place abroad and no longer quite at home in his birthplace.
The film portrays a bucolic setting that is never free from intense pain and hardship, as seen in repeated scenes of an elderly man and a young child plowing the land so hard their bodies merge with the soil. Mosese and his co-DP Phillip Leteka capture the landscape with the same balance of harshness and saturation seen in “This is Not a Burial” – the scarlet streak of fabric often cuts through frames otherwise filled with the blue sky and the young spring green of farmland. According to Mosese, Lesotho remains the most dangerous country in Africa; the fabric intersects between victims and perpetrators, tying the population into a single, expansive wound.
FAQs
1. What is the theme of “Ancestral Visions of the Future”?
“Ancestral
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