Poetry in Contradiction: A Conversation with Lemohang Mosese

Lemohang Mosese’s mind pays no heed to the lines of the map. Though the Mosotho filmmaker and artist left his hometown in northern Lesotho many years ago, the place still has an ambiguous hold on his cinema, drawing in his rhapsodic cine-poetry with gravitational insistence. Sitting somewhere on a fluctuating border between cinema, poetry, memoir, documentary, and oral storytelling, the work of the Berlin-based artist is as boundaryless as his own biography.

Mosese is a filmmaker of feverish imagination. His cinema of sensation and ideas is exploded by diverging forces—history and futurity, oppression and liberation, joy and sorrow—and scattered across global expanses and historical chasms. Taking darting lines of flight from his enclaved birthplace (Lesotho is one of only three countries in the world whose borders exist entirely within those of another state), the self-taught filmmaker salvages moments of visionary possibility from the forces of exile, colonialism, and loss.

On a call which, like Mosese’s own work, straddled two continents, the director spoke about contradiction, cathedrals, and his lifelong love of Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MUBI: How’s life been since your most recent film, Ancestral Visions of the Future[2025], premiered last year?

LEMOHANG MOSESE: The response has been so great, man. People write to me, and most of the time they want to talk about spirituality. With this film, I feel like I managed to express myself in a spiritual language, to offer some kind of spiritual observation, and I am so happy people get it and that it resonates with them on a personal level. Because this film is like eating stones; it’s not a film that’s easy to digest. I’m aware of that.

I wanted to express everything that I ever felt with this film. I wanted to find a language that is as close as possible to how I think, without filters. My brain can be unbearable. I don’t even know how to spell my own name; I always mix the “g” and the “a.” I think in a very fragmented way. With this film, I wanted to vomit out whatever was inside my head, and then try to find a form in that vomit. To see that this resonates with people is just incredible. 

MOSESE: I want to achieve a sense of exhaustion. I wrote this line for one of my films: “When all the language is exhausted and when my tongue has been cut off and when the tears have been spent, what remains?” That is the question that this film is asking: What remains? Ancestral Visions was me trying to spend all the tears and all the words, to literally exhaust the language, to exhaust everything that is in me. And then try to give it some sort of coherence in the editing room. 

But me and Andrés [Hilarión, the film’s editor] wanted to remain faithful to how the ideas came out, and not try to contain them too much in the edit. Part of the beauty of this way of creating is that ideas can contaminate each other. I am in favor of contamination. So we tried to let that happen. To try and boil all of these thoughts, everything that was in my head while making it, down into an hour and a half—it’s ridiculous. We wanted it to be, in a sense, unbearable, like you’re listening to a madman. But it has to be bearable for people, ultimately, so it’s about finding that balance.

MUBI: It’s interesting hearing you talk about this idea of contamination, because films like Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You[2019] and Ancestral Visions of the Future borrow elements from so many different forms and media. They’re quite hard to categorize. How do you think of these films, or classify them?

MOSESE: I don’t believe in form and, to some extent, I don’t believe in language; I just believe in ideas. I think Ancestral Visions is probably going to be my last essay film for a long time, because this essay work is exhausting. It’s too costly. It’s like a well that drinks from you. 

Actually the new stuff I’m working on is completely different. I’m working on a super-contemporary genre film. It’s really refreshing to work on something that’s removed from me. I can hide behind genre. It’s another form of language that I’m discovering and that I’m excited about. 

MOSESE: Yes! That’s why I’m so excited to make one myself. I want to recreate the energy of those films I watched when I was young: Jean-Claude Van Damme, with that kick, or Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon [1973], or Platoon [1986] with Willem Dafoe on his knees with his hands raised up to the sky. The feeling those films gave me made me want to make cinema. It created a portal of escape. 

My work comes from the school of Bertolt Brecht; it confronts the audience with death, or with life, or with some idea, and punishes them with this confrontation. But I think there’s something beautiful about movies that help people escape mundane things, escape from work, escape from the office—movies that let you disappear into another world. One of my favorite films is Cyborg [1989]. It always seemed to me like a whole other, beautiful world that I could enter. Now, I want to try and get back to that feeling of my childhood. 

I started as a poet, and I’ve always glorified poets over filmmakers. Europe tends to praise poets and authors and artists. I became a poet in part because that’s what is praised, and I was rewarded for it. But at the same time, there’s always been another part of me that is fascinated by a completely different kind of cinema. Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favorite filmmakers, but I go to sleep when I’m watching his films. I have never stayed awake for the whole of a Tarkovsky film! His films are more like spiritual texts to me, and I’ve always made work in that mode, but I’ve also dreamed of making something that is the opposite of that too. 

MOSESE: In Lesotho, poetry and the spoken word are woven into the fabric of the culture and the folklore, so poetry is in the fabric of my upbringing too. It goes back to the start of our country; the founder of Lesotho, Moshoeshoe I, wrote praise poetry during “the scattering” [a period of conflict and displacement also known as “Mfecane”]. This was a time when people would sing about war and the killing of enemies. 

And then I got into people like the South African poet Mzwakhe Mbuli. My brother got me into him; his political style sort of became the epitome of poetry for my generation. One of the poets who was very formative for me was the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova. And then, of course, I discovered many other artists like William Blake and T.S. Eliot, and Saul Williams. Williams is my favorite: I love the way he plays with words. He speaks with fire. All these people that I’ve mentioned, there’s fire in them, or lightning—lightning that is caught in a bottle.

MUBI: Something that really strikes me about your work is the way it holds opposites in tension. It’s like you’re trying to join two magnets that are repelling each other. It’s there in your titles even: burial and resurrection, ancestry and futurity. Why are you always returning to these dichotomies?

MOSESE: If you look at Ancestral Visions of the Future, it’s about the beautiful landscape of Lesotho, and yet I impose this scarlet-red cloth over it as a form of transgression. I like transgression. I like the contamination of the sacred by the vile. There’s a moment in This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection [2019] when the protagonist is sitting in the ashes of her burned home. It’s a scene of decay and death. And then some sheep walk into the shot and surround her, corrupting the image of death with a kind of life, a kind of transcendental life. I think poetry exists in contradictions. Life exists in contradictions. 

MUBI: You narrate Ancestral Visions of the Futurein English, and yet you say in that film that you want to speak in your mother tongue, not in “borrowed syllables.” Mother, I Am Suffocatingis also narrated in English. Was that a conscious choice? 

MOSESE: It’s the idea of contradiction that we talked about. All the different tongues in my films meld together into a monstrosity of a tongue. It’s an attempt to bring together all the different sensibilities of the languages I speak and the places I have lived. 

There was a point when I was sick of my mother tongue and I hated everything that came with it. But now, my reasons for leaving Lesotho have started to fade, my memories have started to smooth over in my mind, the edges have begun to be rounded off. When you spend enough time away from somewhere, you start to romanticize it. When you leave a place, you are always transforming, always breaking, and then becoming again. I’m trying to engage with this idea of nostalgia from exile, and the contradictions of exile.

MUBI: I read that you studied architecture to inform your filmmaking. Is that true? 

MOSESE: I don’t naturally create from a place of structure. I studied architecture to try and understand structure and apply it to my filmmaking, which I’m especially doing now that I’m trying to make genre movies that are very different to the work I have made previously. 

I’ve always been obsessed with cathedrals. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea that you walk in and you feel the presence of the divine: something very sacred and something very terrifying at the same time. They are built for you to feel small when you enter. The building creates a divine effect, but it’s an effect that comes from logic and mathematics. I’m interested in this calculation. I’m excited by the idea of building logically to create effects going forward, I don’t want to just vomit words anymore. I still love that free-thinking, free-form cinema, and it’s something I’ll get back to I’m sure, but for now I’m interested in other things.

MUBI: Mother, I Am Suffocating is framed as your final statement on your home country, but then you made two more films there. Are the projects you’re working on currently set in Lesotho or have you, in your words, “exhausted” the subject? 

MOSESE: I’m working on a few things, and they are not set in Lesotho. Honestly, I do think I have nearly exhausted the subject. I think it might be time to take a break from looking into my own abyss. Now I’m interested in looking into the abyss of others!