This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Running time: 2hrs | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
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Lesotho is not a country people tend to spend a lot of time thinking about, even — or perhaps especially — in my homeland of South Africa, which encloses it on all sides, geographically possessive even as the tiny kingdom maintains the independence it declared 55 years ago. Mosotho director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is the first film from Lesotho to make an international impression — indeed, it was Lesotho's first ever entry for the international Oscar — and it sighs and shivers and sometimes screams with the rage and pent-up poetry of a culture rarely given the microphone.
On the face of it, it's an age-old story of “this is my land” defiance. 80-year-old widow Mantoa (the late South African legend Mary Twala, in a quietly ferocious swansong) has buried her husband and all her children in her ancestral pocket of the Maluti Mountains, and won't fold easily when the government announces that her village is to be resettled, to accommodate the building of a new reservoir — non-indigenous water floating over the earth and bones of Mantoa's history. But as vividly and compassionately as Mosese tells her story, through a mixture of granular realism and unruly dream interludes, his film has at its heart a bigger, more searching sorrow: it's an elegy for various communities and ecosystems shifted and ground into dust in the name of progress, in a country perhaps too small to give all its ghosts the space they require. That might make it sound oppressive, but it's both rousing and ravishing, celebrating the ground under it feet without airy sentimentality or Instagram vistas. Lesotho has never had such a close-up.
THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESURRECTION (2020) Written by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese | Shot by Pierre de Villiers | Edited by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese