Ancestral Visions of the Future

After years of living in Berlin, Mosese still struggles with a sense of displacement, as the poetic opening text of Ancestral Visions of the Future reveals. With this film—meandering freely between documentary, reconstruction and imagination—he attempts to rediscover himself in his native Lesotho.

His camera spots a child and an elderly farmer plowing the land together, and captures their labor in jolting close-ups. It wanders through shanty towns and markets. A puppeteer wishes people a longer life; a market woman believes we have to keep dreaming to ward off the darkness. A blood-red ribbon winds through the hills. These images are accompanied by Mosese’s reflections on beauty, the harsher sides of life and memories of his mother’s bravery—and on how a small cinema became his salvation.

The result is an intensely personal film-poem that fans out into history, politics and mythic imagery. With this work Mosese offers both an ode to cinema and a tribute to his mother and his motherland.