Two Films by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (Patreon)

It's a cliche, but it's unavoidably true. A critic experiences few pleasures greater than that of discovering a major new talent, partly because it's so rare. As the saying goes, 90% of everything is crap. Never is this more often true than with younger filmmakers, who are usually too besotted with their influences, or nervously trying to curry favor with audiences and producers, to generate anything particularly innovative. Call me embittered, and I won't deny it. But it usually takes time for a filmmaker to find his or her voice, assuming that they ever do.

Which is my grumpy way of saying that I am very happy to have discovered the cinema of Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. A young director from the southern African nation of Lesotho, Mosese is currently on the festival circuit with two feature-length films, both of which had their premieres in late 2019. But it was early this year, particularly at Sundance and the Berlinale, that the wider critical establishment had occasion to notice this striking new talent. And although there are significant conceptual throughlines to be drawn between Mosese's two films, they are so different in approach that you'd expect them to have been separated by several years and a number of other films, and not just mere months.

Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019)

A deeply personal, atmospheric film, Mother, I Am Suffocating follows the "vertical" logic of poetic imagery rather than the "horizontal" unfurling of narrative. In essence, it is an essay film addressed to a linguistic "you" that is simultaneously direct and fluid. At times, Mosese is speaking to his actual mother, grappling with their relationship and the evolution that he has perceived in her over time. As the speaker explains, Mosese's mother used to be a free spirit until she embraced evangelical Christianity. Then certain aspects of the connection between the two of them -- their love of Michael Jackson, their appreciation of literature and dance -- dissipated.

As the film makes clear, this experience is both specific for Mosese, and a microcosm of the expansion of Christian values in Lesotho, and Africa at large. As the speaker explains, he both loves and hates his homeland, and aims to subject it to a ruthless critique because he loves it, and to express his anguish at feeling out of step with the place where he is supposed to belong. The dominant image of Mother, I Am Suffocating is that of an androgynous woman slowly marching through the market square carrying a cross, as if she were trudging toward Calvary. Like an act of street theater, this vulgarization of the Stations of the Cross elicits looks of confusion and amusement from passersby. As attended by a winged, transgender angel, this incongruous Jesus emphasizes disruption and incompatibility, the basic sense of being "wrong" in one's basic existence. 

Mother, I Am Suffocating represents an unexpected junction between the imagistic African cinema of Soulemane Cissé and Idrissa Ouédraogo, on the one hand, and the performance-based avant-garde of Maya Deren and Jack Smith, on the other.

This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019)

As defined by public myth as Mother is by interior struggle, This Is Not a Burial finds Mosese working on a much larger canvas. It is a more obviously narrative film, with characters and a closed diegesis. But like its predecessor, Burial is driven by visual impulses that frequently overtake the drive toward traditional explication of theme. Where Mother was about Mosese's personal struggles with Basotho identity, expanding outward, Burial is a highly personal film about Lesotho and the Basotho people.

Purely on the basis of its narrative, Burial has much in common, surprisingly enough, with Jia Zhangke's masterpiece Still Life, and the two films would make a mutually enlightening double feature. A village known as Nazaretha is slated for destruction by a government dam project. The citizens are being forcibly relocated to the capital city of Maseru. In fact, this includes the disinterment and reburial of the dead. The village chief, as well as the (Westernized) local man voted to represent the village in the legislature, both appear powerless to stop this process, which is cast by the government as a Great Leap Forward, a necessary stride into modernity. The process itself is represented by a group of faceless men in yellow hazmat suits who walk the valley, surveying the land and offering (forced) compensation for the farmland to be seized. 

The only true resistance to this cultural demolition is Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo), a village elder whose last remaining relative -- her beloved son -- has just died. She is an old woman in mourning attire, and by her own account she is tired of living. In fact, she tries to bribe the local undertaker to dig her grave even as she lives, which is forbidden by tradition. Mantoa, we discover, is the keeper of the village's memories of the dead, the spiritual historian of this land. She sings the traditional funeral songs (as opposed to the Christian choir assembled by the local reverend), and she recognizes that the valley is home to ancestors dating back to the Black Plague.

Lemohang organizes Burial around the musical narration of an unnamed griot (Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha) who plays a traditional Basotho wind instrument, the lesiba. (It resembles a length of straight wooden pipe.) His place in the film introduces a temporal disruption, since we cannot tell whether the main action is happening in the present, or is a myth being recounted as part of Basotho cultural history. 

Nevertheless, Mosese's use of dark interiors, deep, saturated colors, and a stately, almost incantatory pace, is somewhat reminiscent of Pedro Costa's Fontainhas films: an elderly figure standing firm as the physical keeper of a place and a way of life that is being erased by powerful, unseen interests. But Mosese's cinematic language is truly unique, combining the sense of collective subjectivity so common in African storytelling with a countervailing "Western" art-cinema thrust, an approach that infuses the spiritual with the unavoidably material. This Is Not a Burial is a film about clashing histories and sign systems, and that goes to the very core of its form.