By Tshi Malatji
Ancestral Visions of the Future is a meditative and deeply poetic work that transcends conventional storytelling, blending autobiography, ethnography, documentary and myth into a singular cinematic experience. Lemohang Mosese crafts a film that is as much about memory and displacement as it is about the act of seeing—of truly witnessing a people, a land, and a way of life on the precipice of erasure. Through its lingering visuals, haunting narration, and immersive soundscape, the film becomes a living archive, preserving not just the past but the fragile possibilities of the future.
Keeping with its title, the film is a feature-length literary composition overlaid with almost-stationary slow-moving images of people from small villages in Lesotho. The extended narration converts a still of boys laying on roots to dreamers listening to “a requiem” about their village and its people. A woman hanging linen on a line of string becomes a metaphor for their way of life. People are the story and their lives are the exposition.
Rather than seeking to be an epic tale or a thunderous drama, the film is a subtle ode to the land of birth of the filmmaker, Lemohang Mosese. The film also contends itself as a song to cinema and to the mother of the narrator, who is the filmmaker themself.
What follows is a masterpiece of visual cinema that places Lesotho’s identity within the lens. Whether it be vagabonds moving across the farmlands or capturing the portraiture of an old man’s internal war within themself, there is an unraveling in the way the camera captures the people of this village.
The narrator for their part, shares an explicit account of the destitution and resilience of this community, grounded in how they see their soil as sacred and get on with their routines as a practice of living. The rural nature of their laborious toil is exposed as arduous, but also accepted as a part of who they have become. The narrator also ensures that such perchance suffering is not glorified or essentialised as desirable or inevitable, but rather honourable and inescapable.
There are also the sounds of the villages, such as the music of the birds and the plowing of the fields. Apart from the resonant soundtrack which backgrounds the narrator’s voice, much of the film is dedicated to documentary-like natural sounds. Even much of the added soundtrack uses the effect of a horn blowing to allow the film to sound like its image.
There is an effort of authenticity that runs through how the film would like to be perceived, in a way that has become a component of much of African cinema. The motive is evident. This is how life is lived. This explains the long duration of each shot, the inclusion of innocuous activity like a boy wandering through a market, the use of extended narration and the overarching “cinéma vérité” approach of the film. This is auto-fiction, which combines the fluid licence of narrative storytelling with biographical material in order to package one’s life world in cinematic form.
The protagonist does not ever offer their name outright, likely because their vision is more critical than its messenger. In fact, growing up, real names were not commonplace in their homestead where they were called Lemo or Rants’o. But maybe, the apparent overlap between the narrator and the filmmaker makes such a declaration unnecessary.
Yet, the film cannot just be understood as a deeply personal account of Lemohang Mosese’s upbringing and discovery of filmmaking. There is some sort of visual communication which also separates the narrator from the filmmaker. The exposition opens with the narrator’s “first death” and further encounters with being “buried”. These are many of their littered half-lives that they eventually discard in their process of becoming. They are endlessly escaping to new lands of new deaths.
Ancestral Visions of the Future is also about eternal eviction and being cast to “the heartless maw of displacement”. Much of African life is subject to migration to the outskirts of banal, simple life. The narrator critiques coloniality and the expunging of indigenous life. They challenge borders and forced removal. They honour their mother’s efforts in the heartland of the empire, where the narrator now resides, and ponder about their own migration to the city. There are whispers of hunger and the drying of the soil.
Brief mentions of Lesotho’s history are highlighted, including its refuge of South Africans, its resistance against colonisation and trends of urbanisation. There is a longing for the resolution of the continual movements of African life with a paradoxical acceptance of this reality. Greater than the filmmaker is some deeper introspection into how we all have digested our true selves and continue to endure. There is a critique of borders and colonies, likened to ghosts of empire. Blood is depicted as tears. The narration and music grows darker as the runtime enfolds.
The poem crescendos deeper into its metaphors and more overtly visual language while the characters engage much more in fictional acting, becoming symbols of the narration. Some of the scenes emerge as outright ghastly and obscure. Now, the film arrives at its promised becoming. It can only be described as meta-spiritual, with much of the autobiographical material substituted by the ethereal.
There is a conversation between these two forms: the real and the vision. The poem returns to the narrator’s biography. These two movements of the narrative dance for the remainder of the runtime.
Then, finally, the true protagonist of the film is revealed. Sobo Bernard is a Basotho artist guided by the ancestral visions which give the film its title. His spirituality is revealed to be the inspiration for the narrator’s own. Sobo is shown to be a more traditional voice, whose own position in Basotho society is fragile, replaceable by modern religious practice. He is evidence of the erasure of Basotho custom. Indeed, he vanishes almost as quickly as he appears, as does his own descent into becoming “the very disease” he sought to cure.
What makes way is a lacrimosa to cinema itself, depicted to be troubled and overbearing, yet fulfilling. The film leaves us a forewarning about what kind of stories we may forfeit if we do not narrate these ‘visions of our future’ and challenges those who practice cinema to uncover the histories hidden from gaze.
There is an undeniable sorrow in its observations of colonial ghosts, vanishing traditions, and the relentless march of time. There is also a quiet resilience. The film does not offer easy answers or false comfort. Instead, it insists on the necessity of remembrance and of storytelling as an act of survival. By the end, we are left with the understanding that cinema, at its most profound, is ancestral. It is a bridge between what was, what is, and what must never be forgotten. Ancestral Visions of the Future is a lament for all that has been lost and a defiant act of preservation, weaving the fragments of the past into a cinematic tapestry that refuses to let them fade.
Catch the film at DIFF: https://ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za/diff46/ancestral-visions-of-the-future/
Screening Schedule:
18 Jul 17:15 Suncoast 8
27 Jul 14:30 Suncoast 8
This review emanates from the Talent Press programme, an initiative of Talents Durban in collaboration with the Durban FilmMart Institute and FIPRESCI. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author (Tshi Malatji) and cannot be considered as constituting an official position of the organisers.
