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‘Ancestral Visions of the Future’ Review: Lemohang Mosese’s Heavy-Hearted but Fiercely Imaginative Homecoming
Lesotho-born director Lemohang Mosese returns with 'Ancestral Visions of the Future,' a remarkable meditation on roots and exile.
As it meshes autobiographical reflections with third-person fabrications — not to mention the forms of documentary, fiction and art installation — to examine both Mosese’s personal feelings of alienation as an African artist resident in Berlin and his home continent’s more general, ongoing state of becoming, the film’s few wordless stretches become veritable oases of contemplation. This verbal overdrive contributes to a work less approachable than its predecessor, 2020’s punchy and more straightforwardly narrative-driven “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” Still, following a high-profile premiere in this year’s Berlinale Special section, festival programmers and more experimentally inclined distributors should thrill to the new film’s sensory and political potency. Literally threaded through proceedings is the recurring image of a vast length of crimson fabric, its exact shade and texture rippling under the southern African sun, stretched across the rugged Lesotho landscape like a Christo installation — in some scenes even lining the streets of a small market town.
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