‘Ancestral Visions of the Future’ Review: An Essay on Diaspora, Memory, and Home
Blending documentary and poetry, Mosese revisits his homeland through fragmented stories of exile, return, and the mother who built a home for all. Steaming on MUBI.
An audiovisual essay that’s far more creative and interesting visually than in anything strictly tied to sound, Ancestral Visions of the Future is a kind of requiem to his homeland (Lesotho) and to his mother from filmmaker and poet Lemohang Mosese, best known for his award-winning This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. It’s a cine-memoir, or, as he puts it, «an ode to cinema and an eternal nod to my mother»: a film that combines his poetic-historical narration with present-day images of the place, following the various misadventures of the characters who pass through his story.
Beautiful and lyrical on a visual level, Mosese’s film is let down by an overloaded, verbose narration, excessively adjectival if not outright pretentious, that carries the director from one convoluted phrase to an even more tangled one, piling on metaphors that, repeated ad nauseam, end up feeling fairly banal, bordering on self-parody. The film grows stronger when the voice disappears and the director trusts the images. Or when his narration eases off and stops trying to be a literary essay meant to impress professors at the University of Allegory. The baroque text creates such a degree of distance that at times one is left outside the deep emotions it’s trying to evoke.
If you can connect with what it’s telling and aren’t put off by its pomp and circumstance, Ancestral Visions… becomes far more enjoyable, because what it tells is a human, painful story of migration and sacrifice, but also one of beauty, compassion, and various forms of solidarity in the remote, long-suffering African country where the director grew up. Between one reflection and the next, between images of the countryside and of the cities of this small country landlocked within South Africa, Mosese weaves together stories, threading a family and national saga of diaspora, returns, exiles, reunions, and separations.
Diego Noguera’s enigmatic score accompanies the director’s voice while the images — courtesy of DP Phillip Leteka — show a group of children enjoying rural life even amid the most extreme poverty, before turning to a handful of characters who become the film’s circumstantial anchors. Among them is Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a silent woman whose story is inspired by a real case of urban violence, and Sobo (Sobo Bernard), a puppeteer who also works as a healer there in Lesotho.
What links the story’s various, distant points seems to be a long strip of purple cloth that travels, like a visual thread, from one place in Lesotho to another, as though the film were part of a visual project more suited to a museum installation. And while the voice recounts the filmmaker’s migration (he lives and works in Berlin), his returns and reunions, his mother’s efforts to build a house for everyone, and a country stalked by violence and poverty, the film keeps alternating between visual beauty and literary overload, resulting in a noble but flawed project.
