‘Ancestral Visions Of The Future’ review: Intricate visual poem from exiled Lesotho film-maker

Dir/scr: Lemohang Mosese. France/Lesotho/Germany/Qatar/Saudi Arabia. 2025. 88mins

A filmmaker and video artist from Lesotho who resides in Berlin, Lemohang Mosese has made belonging and displacement the main focus of his work. Ancestral Visions Of The Future is a feature-length lament for a homeland seen via the filter of exile. Half poetic autobiography, half hallucinatory travelogue, this cinematic fever-dream is a extra intimate, private mission than the director’s 2019 breakout characteristic, That is Not a Burial, It’s A Resurrection.

There may be an arc of types – from delivery to demise, countryside to metropolis, rootedness to exile

That movie’s placing visible tableaux have been related by a relatable story about an outdated girl’s makes an attempt to dam the development of a dam which might submerge the native cemetery. Although Mosese’s lyrical model continues to be completely distinctive right here, Ancestral Visions lacks an analogous unifying narrative thread. With its voice-over meditations and try to deal with the query ‘The place am I from?’ Ancestral Visions is unlikely to attain fairly the identical degree of indie theatrical distribution after its debut within the Berlinale Particular part, however can stay up for a protracted pageant tour earlier than artwork showcases.

There isn’t any dialogue in Ancestral Visions, solely Mosese’s personal voice-over narration. This prolonged prose poem essay will be swooningly other-worldly – but it surely will also be annoyingly over-wordy. Its reference to the photographs it accompanies is oblique and allusive. When Mosese talks about his childhood in Lesotho, his mom’s frequent absences in England and the momentary jerry-built household home on the outskirts of a provincial city that someway turned everlasting, we see washing draped on the eroded rocks of a river valley, for instance, or a wrecked automobile in a ravine with an important crimson ribbon stretching away from it off into the space.

There may be an arc of types – from delivery to demise, countryside to metropolis, rootedness to exile. Some characters emerge. Sobo, a puppeteer, martial arts adept and herbalist, is, it seems, an actual person who the director met on his return to Lesotho; Mosese turns him right into a form of spirit medium who channels the power and malaise of his place of birth. A lady, Manthabiseng – based mostly on a thief whose homicide by a Taiwanese store proprietor sparked riots in 1991 – appears to signify the undercurrent of violence (notably towards ladies) that marks on a regular basis life on this landlocked southern African constitutional monarchy. One of many few documentary-style items of knowledge that Mosese delivers is the truth that Lesotho has the world’s third highest homicide fee per capita.

In a placing scene set, we guess, in a market road of the capital metropolis, Maseru, Manthabiseng turns into each the conduit and the seamstress of that nice crimson ribbon of material that may be a recurring image within the movie, alongside two menacing harbingers of demise: a BMW E30, notorious within the Eighties as each prison gang’s trip of alternative, and the burning tyres related to homicide by ‘necklacing’. The movie’s memorable, strongly etched visible journey is amplified by the edgy sound design of Berlin-based composer Diego Noguera, which creates a form of organ requiem out of clangs, screeches and howls.