Critics reviews

This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is the first film from Lesotho to make an international impression... and it sighs and shivers and sometimes screams with the rage and pent-up poetry of a culture rarely given the microphone.

This is a severe, uncompromising film; it’s more like a series of images strung together, each framed exactingly, like a painting.

How do I account for my distrust of this highly accomplished film? Perhaps it’s simply that it contains everything a sophisticated festival audience might be looking for: magic realism, anti-capitalist politics, folk spirituality, modern disjunctures, striking landscapes, rich colours, careful sound design, bursts of ethereal or abrasive music, tableau compositions in a square aspect ratio, and a simulation of 16-millimetre film grain which is persuasive at least on the small screen.

A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is as classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.

...[I]t’s a genuinely strange film, but there’s also something classical about its compositions—especially in the ways that Mosese and his cinematographer, Pierre de Villiers, frame the faces of their actors.

Similarly to Linguère Ramatou, in Mambéty’s Hyènes (1992), Mosese’s Mantoa is an extraordinary woman whose angry refusal to bow down to fate haunts you long after you’ve seen it.

Not many films, especially ones with a documentary sensibility, use texture—wool, mud, cement, ashes, and cloth specifically—as a storytelling device the way that This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection does.

By all accounts, This is Not a Burial is an accomplished film. Every technical aspect is considered, especially with Mosese serving as his own editor, conveying the story of an 80-year-old widow, Mantoa, who fights for the right of her fellow villagers to remain in their homes in the face of a massive eviction.

But what the film reveals most of all is a demanding artist (one who, therefore, sometimes requires the patience of the viewer, and their open-mindedness always), endowed with a singular and fascinating voice, who knows how to brilliantly flirt with the border between the real and the invisible or the unspeakable.

Here's the one film that stakes its hopes against all hopes on the common people, the masses. At least one film dared to believe that we can actually change something, that we're not doomed, not dust in the wind's of history, not clowns. Just citizens.