After the critical success of Lemohang Mosese’s masterwork, This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection, the Lesotho director is back with a new project. As usual, it’s another lengthy title, Ancestral Visions of the Future, and as usual, it’s preoccupied with the concept of home.
That might be where the similarities end. The new film has been described as a hybrid of documentary and fiction. But it is more accurately a prose and video amalgam—with the latter only tenuously connected to the former. No synopsis will convey the story of this project because there’s no story. A functional description goes thus: A narrator reads out a long piece of prose about himself and his country, while a series of often striking images adorn the screen.
It is as though after enjoying widespread acceptance on the festival circuit with his previous work, Mosese sought to test how far he’ll be able to push his newfound celebrity in arthouse circles. The result is an overindulgent work clearly intended to be felt rather than expressly enjoyed or even understood. It’s a tribute to the man’s genius that somehow Ancestral Visions is somewhat enjoyable, if overwrought.
Ancestral Visions of the Future marries prose to poetic visuals in frustrating and interesting ways.
Efiko Score: 6.5/10
Indeed, that Mosese is able to make this film—with support from some of the most coveted funding bodies in non-mainstream cinema—is proof that he is operating at a level that almost no African filmmaker of his generation has access to. That, of course, raises an interesting question: Should that power be used on a project that comes across as a lengthy visual essay? Answering that question is beyond the scope of this review.
It was always obvious from This Is Not A Burial that Mosese is a talented writer who, in what amounts to cosmical unfairness, is also a gifted visual artist. Both have always been on display in his work. But while, with his previous film, he figured out a way to showcase his brilliance in a somewhat accessible manner, with this one, he has created a work that requires a literary sensibility, more than a little appetite for fragmentary, episodic work, and some endurance to come through.
To grasp what is at play here is to be interested in sentences and in gorgeous images without worrying too much about meaning. You can tell that the director is offering commentary on his life as an immigrant: raised as a Lesotho boy, he is now a European man. But if this is the story of thousands of Africans from Mosese’s generation, very few of them have access to the sort of filmmaking equipment that makes a great-looking picture like Ancestral Visions possible. Even fewer have his high-level skill across writing, cinematography, and editing. In essence, Mosese has earned his privilege.
Still, one is left with the feeling that although Ancestral Visions goes big on prose and visuals, it is ultimately a minor work in the oeuvre of perhaps the most prodigiously talented African filmmaker of his generation.
Ancestral Visions of the Future screened as part of the Open Doors programme at the ongoing Locarno Film Festival 2025.
