How Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese Crafts Beautiful Chaos in 'Ancestral Visions of the Future'

Acclaimed Lesotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosesereturned to the Berlinale in February to premiere his latest film, Ancestral Visions of the Future. The film, which screens next at the Cinéma du Réel documentary festival in Paris from March 22-29, is another personal, form-bending statement from Mosese, who has been hailed as a visionary.

Mosese's first film since This is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection, his 2019 magnum opus, Ancestral Visions of the Future is another poetic reflection on belonging and dislocation that hearkens to his earlier work on Mother, I am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.

The film embraces fragmented narratives and metaphorical images to craft a visual essay on dislocation and belonging, themes that have concerned Mosese all his career. The two characters that are central to the film's jumbled narrative are Sobo (Sobo Bernard playing a version of himself,) a puppeteer cum herbalist, and Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a tragic maternal figure inspired by a real-life Basotho woman murdered by an avenging horde in 1991.

Employing these characters as a thin crutch to balance a project that is otherwise more interested in the landscape than people, the film essays Mosese's home country of Lesotho, a place he feels both connected to and detached from, sometimes within the same breath. Past and present come to a head alongside history, memory, fantasy, and the disruptions of time.

Haunting the project, as with his earlier work, is the spectral figure of his mother, a presence that has defined his very existence: "My mother has always been the story for me. She is the invisible character in all of my films," Mosese tells OkayAfrica via Zoom from Berlin, where he makes his home. He talks more about making the film, constructing a house of madness, and finding a new direction for his future work.

How did the journey to this particular project start?

I have been living in Berlin for some time now, and when you live in a room or place where the walls don't necessarily hold you, you start to project cities and empires. You create a mirage of some other part of the world waiting for you, perhaps a place that can embrace and hold you. I once saw this African man shouting in his mother tongue on the street, and at that moment, I knew he was me. It almost felt like he was talking to his mother or someone from home right there in front of me in Berlin. I realized it is similar to my projection. His was out of mental illness; mine was out of longing for a place that could call my name. That was the film's beginning, the idea of going back home to try to find a place that could mirror the idea I had in my head. But also coming to the confrontation that this place does not exist. It is only a mirage. That was the essence of the movie itself.

For you who has to return to Lesotho to make your films, there's another level of engagement with this mirage; how do you reconcile that?

It is all in this house of madness. In this house, logic evaporates, and so does reason. When I first moved to Berlin, my laughter would have this loud, crazy grumbling from my belly. That has become softer over the years. You fit into spaces; your laughter does, too. It is like a mask you wear; you suddenly don't see your true form anymore. In this house I built in the film, these faces are not foreign, monstrous, or strange; they are all yours. The seed of this dislocation for me happened in my childhood when we were evicted, and ever since then, I have been looking for this house in every place. And for every place that doesn't hold me, I have been looking for it outside.

Have you found a house of your own yet? Because it seems like it is as much physical as it is metaphorical.

Not yet. I think this house is almost a state of mind. I don't think I will ever find such a place. Nowadays, when I am in Lesotho, I am almost a stranger, and people think I come from West Africa. Every time I speak Sesotho, they look at me with surprise, and I have heard this since I was a child. I have always been this outsider, and, at this point, I think it is in my DNA. Also, when I am in Senegal, some people mistake me for African American.

Let's talk about the writing process and the stories you tell in the film. What is fact, and what is fiction?

I was interested in writing the material, so it comes across more as literature than cinema. Some images inspired the text, while some text inspired images. They shadow each other. I wanted to make it fragmented—half construction, half imagined, half forgotten, and half remembered. I wanted to make a pot of vomit, essentially. The film is like the scribbling of a child. It is a vomit of thoughts and ideas not in any particular order.

I hear you, but how are you then marrying text with visuals?

It is a mirror, and it is impossible to remove one from another. They are shadows of themselves, and both images and text inspire me; they are communicating. I wrote so much text that I had to get rid of about half of it because I also needed the images to breathe.

Ancestral Visions feels like a conversation with your earlier work. Can you situate this film within your filmography?

The idea I am dealing with in all my films is the same, but now I have discovered something I have been looking for. I think this film opened up a new theme for me. It has always been displacement, the land, the soul, location, space, and time. In Resurrection, I speak of a woman sitting in a house that is like a tomb, this place that subjects you to surrender. She is sitting in the ashes, and the sheep walk in, bringing life into death. That place is where I am painting now, this house of madness. When you rise from that place, you are something else. I think that is what I have been looking for. I don't want to say with finality, but if the gods still allow me to create for the next ten years, this is what I will be working on.

The previous films focused on the feminine, but here you bring in, perhaps for the first time, some masculine energy in your work.

Absolutely, and I think it is because I became a father.

Congratulations.

Thank you. I started to think of the meaning of fatherhood. What am I to my father, who was never there in my life? In the film, I say that the word father is a strange word for me, but because I am now one, I went into the darker corners of my soul for this.

The red cloth is a recurring element in the film. What is this about?

Lesotho is one of the most violent places in the world. It is also the most beautiful country with the most beautiful people. I was very much inspired by architecture. I wanted to impose a very transgressive and explicit landscape over another. I wanted to be intrusive on the land. I wanted to exhibit the blood and simultaneously show the land's profanity and beauty.