“This film is an ode to cinema, an eternal nod to my mother,” states Lemohang Mosese in voiceover, near the beginning of “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” his always arresting and sometimes abstruse third feature. He hardly needs to say so. The personal monologue that fills the entire film is sewn through with dedications to his mother and motherland alike, as the Lesotho-born director mourns his distance from the former when she was absent in Europe for part of his childhood, and his distance from the latter during his own adult exile on the continent. “An ode to cinema,” meanwhile, is a superfluous description for a project that is cinema, in its most stimulating and image-rich form, inviting viewers to make what connections they will between sight and sound.
The sound, in this case, is chiefly that monologue, though it’s nervily set off by Diego Noguera’s metallic, atonal score and sonic design. Both lyrical and densely essayistic, Mosese’s words give the audience all manner of narrative and thematic cues, yet sometimes bear an abstract relationship, if any, to the various extraordinary, symbolism-drenched compositions on screen. On occasion, this text is so literary and overwritten that it trips up Mosese himself as narrator.
As it meshes autobiographical reflections with third-person fabrications — not to mention the forms of documentary, fiction and art installation — to examine both Mosese’s personal feelings of alienation as an African artist resident in Berlin and his home continent’s more general, ongoing state of becoming, the film’s few wordless stretches become veritable oases of contemplation.
This verbal overdrive contributes to a work less approachable than its predecessor, 2020’s punchy and more straightforwardly narrative-driven “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” Still, following a high-profile premiere in this year’s Berlinale Special section, festival programmers and more experimentally inclined distributors should thrill to the new film’s sensory and political potency. Indeed, there’s perhaps even a pointed dimension to the film’s rhetorical abundance — a forthright projection of a long-sidelined Black voice.
Literally threaded through proceedings is the recurring image of a vast length of crimson fabric, its exact shade and texture rippling under the southern African sun, stretched across the rugged Lesotho landscape like a Christo installation — in some scenes even lining the streets of a small market town. It appears to represent both the bloodshed that colors the country’s history (as a landlocked territory shaped by British imperialism and Afrikaner apartheid in surrounding South Africa) and the violence that persists within its borders today.
At one point the fabric leads directly to Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a silent character inspired by a real-life woman murdered by a vengeful mob of her fellow Basotho people in 1991, after she failed to notice her child shoplifting in a local store. At another, this baleful ribbon emanates from the shell of a totaled BMW 325iS, the very model of car once associated in the region with gang terror — elsewhere shown cruising and spinning on dusty roads, like urban harbingers of doom amid rural tranquility.
Manthabiseng is one of two human figures onto whom Mosese obliquely maps his own attachments and anxieties regarding his homeland. The other is Sobo (Sobo Bernard, as an interpretation of himself), a sidewalk puppeteer and herbalist whom the filmmaker met on his return to Lesotho, and whose performances and prescriptions seek to educate and heal his fellow men. That gesture of investment in the country and its people perhaps induces some measure of guilt in Mosese, who feels displaced abroad, but no longer quite at home in the place he was born. There is much talk of a makeshift family home, built piecemeal in corrugated iron on the edge of town, but we never visit it. Perhaps it no longer stands, or perhaps the filmmaker is loath to face his past that directly.
In this film, the bucolic is never exempt from visceral extremities of pain and hardship, as in repeated scenes of an elderly man and a young child plowing the land so hard their very bodies are seeded into the soil. Mosese and his co-DP Phillip Leteka shoot the landscape with the same balance of severity and saturation that characterized “This is Not a Burial” — with that scarlet streak of fabric often slicing through frames otherwise dominated by the azure sky and young spring green of farmland. Lesotho, the filmmaker claims, remains the most dangerous country in Africa; the fabric criss-crosses between victims and perpetrators, binding the population in a single, sprawling wound.
