‘Ancestral Visions of the Future’ Review: Lemohang Mosese’s Heavy-Hearted but Fiercely Imaginative Homecoming

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic “This film is an ode to cinema, an eternal nod to my mother,” states Lemohang Mosese in voiceover, near the beginning of “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” his always arresting and sometimes abstruse third feature.

He hardly needs to say so. The personal monologue that fills the entire film is sewn through with dedications to his mother and motherland alike, as the Lesotho-born director mourns his distance from the former when she was absent in Europe for part of his childhood, and his distance from the latter during his own adult exile on the continent. “An ode to cinema,” meanwhile, is a superfluous description for a project that is cinema, in its most stimulating and image-rich form, inviting viewers to make what connections they will between sight and sound.

The sound, in this case, is chiefly that monologue, though it’s nervily set off by Diego Noguera’s metallic, atonal score and sonic design.

Both lyrical and densely essayistic, Mosese’s words give the audience all manner of narrative and thematic cues, yet sometimes bear an abstract relationship, if any, to the various extraordinary, symbolism-drenched compositions on screen.