‘Ancestral Visions Of The Future’ review: Intricate visual poem from exiled Lesotho filmmaker

Dir/scr: Lemohang Mosese. France/Lesotho/Germany/Qatar/Saudi Arabia. 2025. 88mins

A filmmaker and video artist from Lesotho who resides in Berlin, Lemohang Mosese has made belonging and displacement the focus of his work. Ancestral Visions Of The Future is a feature-length lament for a homeland seen through the filter of exile. Part poetic autobiography, part hallucinatory travelogue, this cinematic fever-dream is a more intimate, personal project than the director’s 2019 breakout feature, This is Not a Burial, It’s A Resurrection.

There is an arc of sorts – from birth to death, countryside to city, rootedness to exile

That film’s striking visual tableaux were connected by a relatable story about an old woman’s attempts to block the construction of a dam which would submerge the local cemetery. Though Mosese’s lyrical style is still utterly distinctive here, Ancestral Visions lacks a similar unifying narrative thread. With its voice-over meditations and attempt to address the question ‘Where am I from?’ Ancestral Visions is unlikely to achieve quite the same level of indie theatrical distribution after its debut in the Berlinale Special section, but can look forward to a long festival tour before art showcases.

There is no dialogue in Ancestral Visions, only Mosese’s own voice-over narration. This extended prose poem essay can be swooningly other-worldly – but it can also be annoyingly over-wordy. Its connection with the images it accompanies is indirect and allusive. When Mosese talks about his childhood in Lesotho, his mother’s frequent absences in England and the temporary jerry-built family house on the outskirts of a provincial town that somehow became permanent, we see washing draped on the eroded rocks of a river valley, for example, or a wrecked car in a ravine with a great red ribbon stretching away from it off into the distance.

There is an arc of sorts – from birth to death, countryside to city, rootedness to exile. Some characters emerge. Sobo, a puppeteer, martial arts adept and herbalist, is, it appears, a real person that the director met on his return to Lesotho; Mosese turns him into a kind of spirit medium who channels the energy and malaise of his native land. A woman, Manthabiseng – based on a thief whose murder by a Taiwanese shop owner sparked riots in 1991 – seems to represent the undercurrent of violence (particularly against women) that marks everyday life in this landlocked southern African constitutional monarchy. One of the few documentary-style pieces of information that Mosese delivers is the fact that Lesotho has the world’s third highest murder rate per capita.

In a striking scene set, we guess, in a market street of the capital city, Maseru, Manthabiseng becomes both the conduit and the seamstress of that great red ribbon of fabric that is a recurring symbol in the film, alongside two menacing harbingers of death: a BMW E30, infamous in the 1980s as every criminal gang’s ride of choice, and the burning tyres associated with murder by ‘necklacing’. The film’s memorable, strongly etched visual journey is amplified by the edgy sound design of Berlin-based composer Diego Noguera, which creates a kind of organ requiem out of clangs, screeches and howls.