Sundance Prize Winner, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, pens a lengthy piece of personal poetry on a blank cinematic canvas, dreaming of his lost city, while his homeland struggles to recall the language of his dreams. In Ancestral Visions of The Future, he portrays a world beyond mere observation. He depicts the world of becoming. Since the very beginning, the expense of becoming blood appears in the different spots of the film, from meadows to the valley nestled into the water in the shape of a red fabric ribbon moving through the whole story, and we know that wound is going to hurt us, as he suffered from that hugely. His detailed poem resembles a requiem for death, as he wanders through the twilight of exile and belonging. He never serves a purpose on the silver screen but bewilderment in the frames of benevolent footages, symbols, and colours.
Ancestral Visions of The Future employs fragmentary storylines featuring a young boy, a market lady, and a puppeteer to examine the director’s childhood in the mountainous southern African nation of Lesotho and the exile that has characterised his adult life in Berlin. While the camera moves on the natural scenery, showing some ladies washing their clothes near the river, the narrator mourns with the first sentence of dislocating to a building confined to walls that never crumble. Since his mother is busy with her own achievements, the young boy stays with his grandmother. “We stayed behind with our grandmother: me, my brother, my uncle, and my cousins, seven souls bound together by blood and necessity,” the narrator said. He clarifies that their eviction from the only home he had ever known occurred when he was barely eight years old. But it was just the beginning of missing home.
Lemohang Mosese, Mosotho director and screenwriter, employs symbolic scenes to depict a young boy and an old man on land that requires planting and harvesting. Is it the stereotypical tale of father and son and the eternal earth of birth, death, and rebirth? The close-ups of youth and ageing portray the dual face of humans and the agony of farming via some slow filming techniques, like torturing in the moments to witness how hard our ancestors bear to pass on life to us—the generation of oblivion. The best description of the situation is what he reads: “We are no longer the earth dwellers; we are the material in the hand of a shaped world with cube building.”
From Berlin, all we see are a few marble statues and a brief glance at the European city that frames the depth of the narrator’s words: “In Berlin, a city sculpted from cold stone and steel, Baobab trees do not grow.” The philosophical reading of home is here in Europe, and the truth of origin is there beneath the land of ancestors.
Sobo, the martial artist, is one of the other important characters of the narrative. Dancing in a class while the sitting students are gazing at Sobo, we see a sentence written on the chalkboard: “God is good all the time.” For Sobo, the city is where people greet each other with subtle nods, not the buildings confining the unshaking walls. Here we see the huge flow of words coming through the scenes of streets, the puppet show, and the screaming mother in the market. Grasping them is like following a wild horse running in the meadow—never ever possible, so the best is to stand and see them as fast as time moves.
Lemohang Mosese, as he desperately strays from home and resides in a twilight between birth and death, explores the magic of forgetting and the path to remembering in cinema. Here, we deeply understand his personal philosophical poem on home, mother, father, and friend on the track of time on a land in which violence and warmth are living hand in hand, even after a father like Sobo sees the death of his sons or a mother in the market screams for her child. It seems the story of Lemohang Mosese’s ancestors and many others is the same narration of humans buried under the dust of time. But here we are, the grandchildren of necessity, to bring a new chapter of wisdom through the creation of cinema.
The home is gone, but Lemohang Mosese’s film Ancestral Visions of The Future, coupled with masterful cinematography, leaves something unforgettable in our hearts—something we may remember in our dreams, even if we forget the language of the dream. Similar to the cinematic poet Andrei Tarkovsky, Lemohang Mosese delivers his poetry with a louder and more severe tone, as if each word pierces your heart without causing any bleeding.
Mosese is a co-founder of Mokoari Street Media, a production business and artists’ collective that created Ancestral Visions of The Future in collaboration with Paris-based Agat Films and in co-production with Germany’s Seera Films. Established in Lesotho in 2009, it exemplifies the camaraderie that Moses asserts is gaining traction among his generation of African filmmakers, which he characterised as “the greatest currency we possess.” Ancestral Visions of The Future premieres in the Berlinale Special strand on 20 February.
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