Sundance prizewinner Lemohang Mosese returns to the Berlin Film Festival with his third feature, “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” which premieres Feb. 20 in the Berlinale Special strand.
A deeply autobiographical work, the film is an artful meditation on dislocation and belonging that blurs the lines between reality and reconstruction. Through fragmented narratives involving a young boy, a market woman and a puppeteer, it explores the director’s childhood in the mountainous Southern African kingdom of Lesotho, as well as the exile that has marked his life as an adult in Berlin.
The film finds Mosese returning to a country he explored with the elegiac docufiction “Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You,” a Berlinale Forum premiere in 2019, and again in his arresting sophomore feature, “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection,” which won a special jury prize at Sundance in 2020.
Both of those films were deeply personal projects that the director says made him reluctant to return to Lesotho with his latest feature. “It was not a chapter that I really wanted to open again,” Mosese tells Variety. “I wanted to move forward.”
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He inevitably found it difficult, however, to leave the past behind, and the years did little to ease the pain of exile. Tapping into what he describes as “a very raw and primal and rage-y space,” Mosese finally chose to go back to Lesotho: to return to the moment when his family was evicted and forced to relocate to the outskirts of his hometown, Hlotse.
That event marked a turning point in the director’s life. Clinging to his memories decades later, Mosese was troubled by fears that “the idea of return was just a mirage … that allowed me to withstand the treacheries of Europe.” In Berlin, he says, he assimilated, becoming in the process a different, unrecognizable version of his former self. “I became anything other than a Black man,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons why I needed to go back.”
It was an uneasy homecoming that found him grappling with contradictions — what he calls his “patchwork of borrowed faces, of borrowed identities.” But when the masks finally came down, he came to recognize a new version of himself: a “king of many faces.”
Mosese is among the more provocative filmmakers working in Africa today, and as with his previous films, “Ancestral Visions of the Future” is an excoriating critique of the legacy of exploitation and violence wrought on the continent by the former colonial powers. It is a critique that extends to the financing structures that support African cinema today — the irony of which is not lost on the director.
“I hate that my work should [have to] mention Europe,” he says, “[but] we can only work with these contradictions.” He paraphrases the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who once told a French reporter that “Europe is on the periphery of Africa.” “My work should not center [Europe]. It should center the people that I’m speaking with — the people that I’m speaking for.”
Mosese is a co-founder of Mokoari Street Media, a production company and artists collective that produced “Ancestral Visions” alongside Paris-based Agat Films, in co-production with Germany’s Seera Films. Founded in Lesotho in 2009, it’s an example of the solidarity that Mosese says is gathering momentum among his generation of African filmmakers, something he describes as “the greatest currency we have.”
“I think with time, we can be able to produce our own films … without relying on European money,” he says. The future for African cinema is “still unknown,” he says, the continent’s filmmakers “in the process of becoming.”