This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
2020 · Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Amongst the mountains of Lesotho, an 80-year-old widow winds up her affairs and makes arrangements for her burial. But when her village is threatened with resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a spirit of resistance within her community.
dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese · 2020
The first film ever submitted to the Oscars by Lesotho, and a debut of staggering visual confidence from Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, a self-taught Mosotho filmmaker working from Berlin. An eighty-year-old widow, having buried everyone she loves, prepares calmly for her own death — until word comes that her village, with its ancestral graves, is to be drowned beneath a dam reservoir. What follows is less social-realist protest drama than visionary elegy: Mosese frames the highlands in a boxy, painterly ratio, saturates his palette like stained glass, and hands the narration to a griot playing the lesiba, a traditional mouth-bowed string instrument, so the whole film unfolds as sung legend. At its center is Mary Twala Mhlongo, the veteran South African actress in her final leading role, her face a landscape as eroded and enduring as the mountains. The film took a Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2020 and announced a new voice in African cinema — one drawing on Sembène and Mambéty's defiance but arriving at something closer to liturgy, a requiem for every community asked to trade its dead for progress.
Lines of influence
- Touki Bouki (1973) — The seed inherits Mambéty's collision of griot oral-tale rhythm with saturated, near-surreal African color, staging myth and departure as image rather than plot.
- Hyènes (1992) — A returning avenging figure and a whole village's moral displacement told as parable across sun-scorched landscapes — the same allegorical-elegy register applied to communal uprooting.
- Ceddo (1977) — Sembène's use of oral-tradition narration and sung legend as the film's structuring spine, treating cinema as a griot's mode of address, is the direct precedent for the sung-legend framing.
- The Color of Pomegranates (1969) — Frontal, tableau-flat compositions and densely saturated liturgical iconography that render a life as a sequence of sung stanzas rather than dramatized scenes.
- Nostalghia (1983) — Elegiac long-take landscapes charged with faith and requiem, where a solitary figure carries a ritual burden through mist and ruin — the transcendental-elegy grammar Mosese adopts.
- The Turin Horse (2011) — Mosese trained at Tarr's film.factory; the debt is direct — durational tableaux, ostinato repetition, and the apocalyptic stubbornness of rural people refusing to leave dying ground.
- Horse Money (2014) — Chiaroscuro static portraiture that monumentalizes the marginalized and displaced, holding faces like painted icons until they become landscape — the landscape-face compositional logic.
- Silent Light (2007) — Transcendental widescreen landscape building to a literal resurrection climax, treating a rural faith-community's grief with sacramental patience — the resurrection-as-formal-event kinship.
- Tabu (2012) — Boxy near-academy framing and desaturated-then-saturated register deployed as elegy for a vanishing colonial Africa, narration sung over image like a lament.
- Days of Heaven (1978) — Whispered off-screen narration laid over golden-hour landscape, letting a folk-toned voice mythologize labor and land instead of dialogue driving the scene.
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) — Ancestral spirits and animist folk-legend woven into an unhurried rural elegy, where the dead and the land co-inhabit the frame — sibling in the ancestral-graves cosmology.
- Atlantics (2019) — Contemporary West African elegy of displacement in which the uprooted return as spectral ancestors, scored to griot-like incantation over coastal light — the closest sibling in craft.
- Timbuktu (2014) — Saharan-African landscape elegy where communal loss is composed in painterly wide tableaux and music carries the mourning, extending the same continental art-cinema lineage.
- Félicité (2017) — Music and sung performance function as narrative engine and grief-vessel for an African protagonist, the lesiba/song-as-narration approach in a sibling register.
- Vitalina Varela (2019) — A grieving woman rendered in monumental low-key portraiture, a requiem built from stillness and ritual gesture — sibling in the liturgy-requiem mode and the final-testament gravity.
- Augure (Omen) (2023) — Hyper-saturated palette married to Central African folklore and curse-legend, staging belief as bold color-blocked image — a descendant carrying forward the saturated visionary-folk aesthetic.