Why Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is urgently seeking development funds for ‘The Chattering of Teeth’

After the global success of This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, writer and director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese plans to return to his native Lesotho to shoot his second fiction feature, The Chattering of Teeth in late 2023.

Set again the backdrop of Lesotho in 1852, the story follows a father and son who take refuge in a fortress city on the top of a mountain, inhabited by a population of outcasts trying to rebuild their lives but still haunted by their experiences of warfare and siege. The idea for the film “has a lot to do with my childhood, I create a lot from my childhood memories. I wanted to make a film about generational trauma or the places or the events that reveal our true selves,” Mosese explains. “I’m a student of history, I like studying the behaviour of human beings in the plague or during war and how do humans react to that, to make sense of life.”

The project is produced by Cait Pansegrouw and Elias Ribeiro of Cape Town-based production outfit Urucu. Pansegrouw and Mosese will present the project at the co-production market of the fourth edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops project incubator event, which runs online November 22-25.

It is now in development with Mosese in the treatment phase. The project has backing from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund but it needs more development funding to enable Berlin-based Mosese to return to Lesotho to write the script, start initial casting discussions and plan for training and outreach that will be part of the production.

“It’s an urgent situation to secure more development funds,” says Pansegrouw. “Lesotho is a place without any infrastructure or funding instruments for the film.”

Mosese explains it is important for him that his films can help build infrastructure and skills in Lesotho, a small landlocked country surrounded entirely by South Africa.

“This is my challenge, to spend time to train the talent there in front of and behind the camera. This is Not a Burial was a communal project and I want to work with the communities even more on the next film. We can educate everyone from the runners to the gaffers. I would like to work with non-actors to train them, and this takes a lot of energy. I want to push it as far as we can. I want to have at least 80% of the cast from Lesotho,” he adds.

The development time will also be important, Pansegrouw explains “to give more time thinking about how we’re going to structure the training aspect. We attempted some of that with This is Not a Burial, but that was more on the fly. We’d like to plan it more in advance.”

They hope to shoot at the actual Thaba Bosiu mountain range where the story is set; Mosese grew up with stories of that era and is now also doing more historical research.

Pansegrouw said the setting of 1852 won’t be the biggest hurdle of the production, as they will be shooting at a remote mountain where some places are without roads, electricity or running water. She explains, “The truth is that people especially in the mountains, in the deep, deep, deep rural areas are living as if it’s 1852…In that way, I’m not too daunted by the period.”

This is Not a Burial won more than 30 festival awards, including a jury prize at Sundance. It was Lesotho’s first-ever Oscar submission. “The success of This is Not a Burial  has helped the visibility of the new project enormously,” said Pansegrouw. “That was such a distinct film and the industry has an inherent belief in Lemohang’s cinematic voice.”