At the Berlinale a few years ago, the African filmmaker with the most buzz was a director from Lesotho, a country nobody really thinks about when they think of cinema. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s first film appeared at the festival and may or may not have been seen by everyone who heard about it. But they could be forgiven for assuming he was that year’s recipient of European geniality (or inverted condescension) towards the first international cinematic fruits of a small African country.
Well, all a person who made that assumption now needs to do, to wipe off that thought, is to see his second feature film, This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Its standalone magnificence is certain to provoke applause. It is entirely fair to accuse the film of having a pretentious title. But when a film is this good, its director has pretty much acquired every right to name his work however he desires. But more is needed to produce a film of such a high artistic achievement than a knack for long titles. This is Not a Burial is poetic but retains narrative coherence. It is concerned about an ordinary life but the film is itself extraordinary. It is rare for a work of obvious ambition to meet its match in a director’s power of execution, but that is what has happened here. That Mosese has written, directed and edited this film is even more remarkable.
Onscreen, the film belongs entirely to Mary Twala, its lead actress who has now passed on. She owns a face that clearly has seen anything the world has to throw her way. Which is a good thing because her character, Mantoa, is engaged in a fight with a government that wants to resettle her village. Where is an old woman go? As she tells anyone willing or even unwilling to listen, her land is the only life she has known, it is the place where her umbilical cord is buried, the place where her parents are buried. Why does the government want to see her buried elsewhere?
This is a film about both the inevitability of modernity and the all-conquering spirit of capitalism. But as shaped by Mosese and with Mary Twala‘s ferocious performance, this is also a film about a certain kind of defiance, the tough, enduring spirit of an old woman’s will to do battle for what she believes in. Her ancestor is Chinua Achebe’s popular hero Okonkwo. Famously, that man was against the eroding of his beloved Igbo culture by the white man—until a downfall caused partly by his own hubris.
There is no hubris to be found with Mantoa, even though, as with Okonkwo, her battle is both personal and communal. But unlike Achebe’s hero, Mosese’s is aware of her own inconsequence in the grand cosmic play of human existence, given that her concerns are more centered on her own death and not her life, which she understands is certain to end sooner. Why then does she deserve this grand treatment and our attention? Who knows? But the film takes it as a given and mythologizes her struggles, allowing the tale of her life be told by a narrator we see onscreen away from the action. As played by the South African actor Jerry Mofokeng, the narrator never really tells us if he is in the present, past, or future. But like us, he is awed by Mantoa’s life.
This layer of extra flourish is effective because of how the cinematography lights up the narrator, and for the relish Mofokeng himself takes with his excellent performance. In effect, Mosese has made a film filled with two great performances. That would have been enough—but his own virtuosity, too, is in full display. His second feature film is a masterpiece.
Director, writer, editor: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Cast: Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha
Cinematographer: Pierre de Villiers
Costume design: Nao Serati
Music: Yu Miyashita
Producer: Elias Ribiero, Cait Pansegrouw,
Distributors: Arizona Distribution (France) (theatrical), Elite Filmes (Brazil) (theatrical), Dekanalog (USA) (all media), Trigon-film (Switzerland) (all media)
Runtime: 117 minutes
