Lesotho filmmaker Lemohang Mosese has said it’s not his job to make projects with the intention of making people want to come to Africa. He was speaking at a Q and A session after the screening of his latest project, Ancestral Visions of the Future, as part of the 2025 Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors programme in Switzerland.
“My work is very personal,” he said. “There are other films that [make you] want to come to Africa, it’s beautiful.”
“I don’t create my stuff with the [intention] of pleasing everybody [or whether] people are invited to the space. That’s not my job. My job is to be truthful to my ideas. Also, you will be too naïve, especially nowadays, to only think of my film as the way it is.
Pointing to the big screen at the Teatro Kursaal venue in Locarno, he said, “This is an allegory, this is my allegory. This is my interpretation of my space. If you think this is how people dress, this is how people behave—people barking in the street—it is your own thing. I don’t have to correct you and say people don’t talk like this. People don’t bark in the streets. That’s your own interpretation. It’s your naivete, it’s your own folly in a way.”
He added that people are generally “smart enough” to think that people don’t bark in the streets, as one character in his docufiction film does. He admitted that maybe some people might take his work literally as representative of behaviour in Lesotho, but he had no intentions of correcting them. “That’s not my job to correct them,” he said, with a short laugh.
The new film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February and has since been noted by critics for being challenging. The challenging texture of the film was again brought up during the Q and A in Locarno, even as Mosese had acknowledged the film’s difficulty before the start of the screening.
Faced directly with a question from an audience member who said she was from Botswana, Mosese said, it wasn’t trying to figure out what’s he’s saying with Ancestral Visions is unnecessary. “What’s the meaning?” he asked. “Just enjoy the visuals on the wall. That’s it.”
In response to a question about the non-linear form his latest work, Mosese compared it to his previous film, This Is Not A Burial, It Is A Resurrection. That film was “classical” cinema; the new one demanded something different. “This one did not require me to be linear because nothing is linear about memory. It’s like a dream.”
Asked if this means his genre is magical realism, he said, “Whatever you call it. There’s no form to it. That’s why I said at the beginning [before the screening] that it is work that you should see with your ears and hear with your eyes.”
