“An ode to cinema” — an audacious claim with which to open one’s feature, but audacity courses through the work of Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. He’s as qualified as any contemporary director to characterize his film as such, an artist to whom future cinematic odes may justly be dedicated. His 2019 narrative feature This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection radiated a kind of creative passion and vitality that could scarcely be believed given the modesty of its production. With the international acclaim it received, he’s boldly chosen to narrow his scope with his follow-up, turning in on himself for the esoteric, quasi-autobiographical Ancestral Visions of the Future. A vivid, personal juxtaposition of visual essay and verbal poem, its stylistic celebration of the audiovisual arts ensures its worthiness of the aforementioned claim, even if Mosese’s commitment to the eccentricities of his premise prevents it from achieving a power equal to his previous feature.
Mosese tells of his childhood in Lesotho, moving between towns, homes, and familial guardians, and then his adulthood in Berlin, in a florid voiceover whose poetic indulgences are capable of captivating and enervating in equal measure. His romantic vocabulary is overly dense, but also beautiful and richly descriptive; the film has no diegetic dialogue beyond occasional clips of documentary footage, seamlessly spliced into enacted sequences that accompany the narration, and for all its overbearing verbosity, it tells Mosese’s story with potency and sincerity. But he’s a lesser wordsmith than he is an imagemaker — in a time when blockbuster films largely appear awash in grey sludge, and drab palettes and shallow depth of field define the aesthetics of so many independent films, Mosese’s films are vibrant in color and detail, and the full emotive and narrative capacity of the cinematic image. His textures are palpable, his spaces alive with character, his colours exquisitely saturated. Ancestral Visions is too authentic in its style to be quite hyper-real, even in its Parajanov-esque expressive tableaux, yet never visually dull. The combination of the wondrous cinematography, courtesy of Phillip Leteka and Mosese himself, with the soundtrack of voiceover and Diego Noguera’s anxious, atonal score and sound design, produces a most singular artistic statement, communicating the tenderness of Mosese’s recollections — the romanticized nostalgia and the clear-eyed pain and regret.
These recollections concern the past but are related in the present, in a film whose very title blurs distinctions between temporal states. We live for the future, but can never escape the past — by the time information has reached our sensory organs, been transmitted to the brain, and translated into knowledge and appreciation of the world around us, it’s already in the past. Mosese’s memories are thus depicted as a past (in his voiceover) still present (in the images [re]created). He tells of his mother’s toil, envisioning a future for her family, one that both has now faded into memory and is still occurring. He tells of the rural communities that abandoned their villages for a future in the city, where the violence of encroaching poverty was replaced by the threat of physical violence, and the violence of the fear this instilled. Ancestral Visions operates in a temporal zone in which the future of the past and the past of the future co-exist, experienced, described, remembered, foreseen, and known concurrently. This is the film’s most compelling quality, a relationship to time that recalls Resnais in its implicit assertion that all one’s previous experiences are not lost to time, but rather accrue as they occur and recur ad infinitum until death. The pain of the past is never forgotten, but then nor is the joy.
If this provokes some academic interest, it’s of limited efficacy — it’s somewhat incidental, as Mosese’s preoccupation appears to be telling his story, and he does so by sacrificing a little insight and candor for grandiosity. In his magnificent images, he indubitably earns his flowers for this sacrifice, but the narration that ties these images together is too turgid, too loquacious to connect with the viewer. The artistry is plain to see and easy to appreciate, and the academic interest is obvious, but Ancestral Visions’ virtues don’t extend far beyond these attributes. It’s nonetheless a fine, unique film with enormous value in some aspects, but it demands a few more aspects to make the impression it should.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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