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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Ancestral Visions of the Future Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography.
Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed by South Africa, Ancestral Visions of the Future is a direct confrontation with his diasporic status as an exiled artist now settled in Berlin. High-flown incantations of voice-over delivered by Mosese himself convey feel the ache of an individual estranged from what he once knew and yearning for reconnection to his heritage. More concrete motifs emerge as he subsequently meditates on his relationship to his mother, the unrest overtaking a nation that’s still a constitutional monarchy in civic terms and to his belated discovery of cinema.
I met Mosese in the Berlinale’s main Palast venue the day prior to the film’s premiere, where he was able to expound on his intentions for its content, and zoom out onto related matters, such as the health of an overall Black cinema, and other global crises at large.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the origins of this project. Did you want to get on with another feature—a hybrid documentary this time —while preparing your next fiction project?
Mosese: I was developing two feature films at the time and met Rasha Salti from Arte, who’s also a programmer, and she told me that she’d support me if I ever wanted to do something. But at that time, I didn’t have the strength or energy; that rage was not there anymore. So, I waited for a long time. Whilst I was finishing writing, I saw this mentally ill man, who was an African, at this restaurant next to my house. That’s the first time I realised that I have another film, to do with home, to do with fractured memories, and finding my place.
Filmmaker: Can you explain the contrast between your description of Lesotho as the “‘most dangerous place in Africa,” and wanting to replace that mentally with a beautiful city constructed in your mind?
Mosese: I was interested in having a transgressive landscape of a red, scarlet, bloody hand [the long sheet of fabric], imposing it on an existing beautiful landscape—it actually mirrors the whole idea of the violence that’s in the country. A few years ago, I think we were the third highest murder capital. Yet the people of Lesotho are the most amazing and beautiful I’ve ever met. It’s the duality—that’s why I’ve talked about the idea of thorns, so that like a flower, it grows thorns to protect itself. But we’re living in a world without this state of survival. The thorns that grew up to protect you have become very permanent. The places with the most light have strong shadows.
Filmmaker: The first time we see the African ancestor figure in the first half is very powerful. I imagine you wanted to create these very elastic parameters and boundaries in the film?
Mosese: It’s a work of a lot of half-remembered, half-forgotten memories and imaginings all melted into one. Even the idea of these men melting their bodies into this older man, millenia of generations in-between melting into each other. It’s the idea of this futuristic yet ancient-looking character as well. He represents some utopia, some ancient future.
Filmmaker: How do you achieve such vivid and almost expressionistic colours in your films? You seem to make all the exterior shots very colourful without manipulating or tweaking them in post that much.
Mosese: One of the things I was very deliberate about is that I have this imagined landscape that I’m imposing on this natural landscape, and it’s very transgressive. So much of the story is this imposition, and I felt like I want to bring the beauty of the people through colors. Through the texture, the exteriors, the movement of the people, the greetings—trying to emphasize the beauty through mundane things. I was always trying to balance it with the violent landscape I created in the film.
Filmmaker: In the press notes, I like how you describe the final realisation you come to, that to enter the familiarity of home, you need to abandon yourself, and maybe your individuality.
Mosese: Yeah, I think my great accomplishment was to build this cathedral, this temple to the “house of madness,” where I want to invite the audience to see through its windows, to see the world that’s always moving. There’s no penalties, no endings. Life doesn’t end—it’s continuous. And there’s the monstrosities of faces that we wear and the songs that we grow to protect ourselves. The new skin needs to be forged again.
I always had the idea of Sobo, the old man and the young boy plowing and gouging out his eyes. The idea of the communion with the soil or the idea that one must gouge his eyes out to have a sight. But I still don’t know what it means—I’m yet to discover what it means to me. And also, when it comes to the woman [Manthabiseng, a character inspired by a real-life Lesotho woman whose son was murdered in 1991 for shoplifting, provoking a further riot], it’s based on the true character. The inspiration for the story was the riots. And also her as a character, the idea that the punishment of her son was used during apartheid to get rid of the apartheid regime collaborators. The execution is actually such a violent act, they call it a “necklacing”—it still exists.
Filmmaker: When you say you fell in love with cinema in Lesotho, what were you watching. I imagine you didn’t see directors like Tarkovsky until much later?
Mosese: Yeah, the films that inspired me were Platoon, Cyborg, Universal Soldier.
Filmmaker: Oh, so quite genre.
Mosese: Yeah, very genre. The funny thing is that my first film was an experimental film, but I didn’t know experimental film existed. But those genre films helped me, I think, to be able to allow ideas and never confine them, because I didn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. I didn’t go to film school—that’s why I say my first film is so experimental. I think language should be something that can be discarded, reused and abused. It should not be a language where we claim it as the formula in which we tend the lens to a particular group of people. It evolves and breaks, it’s always becoming.
Filmmaker: And I suppose it’s quite rare that a filmmaker themselves would make this taxonomizing comment. It’s usually up to people like me, the film critics, to define these “languages.”
Mosese: Yeah, yeah, because the next film will be totally different. Then [I] will be tired of that aesthetic. I don’t think you can do it again in the next film. I don’t like language, although I happen to be good at it!
Filmmaker: This is also a film with literary aspirations as well, with the poeticism of your voice-over. Could you talk about its southern African literary inspirations, which are also rooted of course in the region’s political struggles?
Mosese: The mythologies that I heard as a kid, oral literature, are really the ones that shaped the way I see the world and think. The stories are meant be retold. They’re always evolving, always changing.
Filmmaker: Being an artist in Berlin today, do you have any remarks on the straitened cultural climate for free speech and dissent? I’m sure you have thoughts on the notion of a “national memory culture.”
Mosese: I was watching my friend Eugene Jarecki’s film, Why We Fight, his documentary about Reagan, America and propaganda. It’s about why people went to war and the lies that came after it. It’s really beautiful. It almost portrays America as a house on fire. He made it 20 years ago, and it’s such a reflection of the world today. I feel like the world is literally on fire. I feel like we’re on the precipice, on the edges, on the verge of a “polycrisis.” And I feel like it’s sad, but it’s also the beauty of it. When the center collapses, it’s sad of course—there will be a lot of suffering, you know? But also, there is always rebirth. Everything is always breaking and always becoming.
