2019 Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
In a small village surrounded by mountains somewhere in Lesotho, the 80-year-old widow Mantoa waits for the return of her only surviving relative: her son, who works in a South African coal mine. It is Christmas and he would come home. Messengers, however, bring the sad news: her son died in a mining accident.
ليس دفناً، إنما القيامة
The 68½ Melbourne International Film Festival Online - Film Seven
The Sublime Squealing of Sorrow
Strange storytelling in the most deliciously comprehensible way. Death-dress Grandma kicking the assess of men half her age; a weird and exhilarating depiction of grief and community and the sorrow of losing your land and your home and your loved ones and your history; wailing for each with an equally fierce screaming pitch. I'll kill the Coronavirus for getting in the way of this film. Its fabulous sense of collective spirit and uprising would have made it awesome to watch in the cinema with others. I shifted to about eight different positions in my room, trying to get the best experience for this film at home. Fair to say I loved it to death. This film is my Yomeddine or Give Me Liberty of the MIFF year; crushed it.
Rest In Peace, Mary Twala, you legend.
The film’s ending is a total knockout, and it brought me to tears. A powerful slow-burn about grief and the existential horror of colonialism. About a community who gives meaning to the land they stand on, and its rich, intimate history. Meaning that a world determined to “progress” (whatever that means), doesn’t value.
Cinematography, score, sound design is all just gorgeous. Mary Twala’s performance is a stunner. Glad I caught this before making my 2021 list.
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese and Lesotho's entry into the 93rd Academy Awards, sadly failing to make the shortlist, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is an intimate yet epic tale, a mysterious drama about collateral damages caused by progress. It stars Mary Twala Mhlongo as Mantoa, an elderly widow prepared to depart her life after her son and only surviving relative dies; the difficulty appears to be that the scythe carrying hooded figure seems to have overlooked her.
Unfolding in Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa, her village becomes threatened with government plans to forcibly resettle the residents due to an impending land acquisition to make way for a dam. She finds a renewed will to…
Lesotho’s first ever entry to the Oscars for 2021 Best International Feature film is a blistering proclamation and a reclamation of one’s honor and dignity in This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Led by a fierce performance from the late Mary Twala, the film uncovers the struggle of an old woman and her community trying to save their homeland from the oppressive establishment and industrialization. Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese injects his film with the raw beauty of Lesotho’s undiluted landscapes, and together with its alluring production design and cinematography, the film’s impact is certainly resonating, and altogether bewitching. The late Mary Twala, one of the important figures of African cinema, ignites a certain kind of ferocity that is…
This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is a true art film, going for an all style approach to cinema. It uses an enclosed frame to single out characters within its intimate aspect ratio. Yet This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is also expansive, as the film is about community and often has backgrounds that consists almost entirely of people. The first half hour of This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is unfocused and abstract, but when the narrative takes form the film really grows into something special. This is a film of death and its place in culture, seen through a Christian lens and a community lens. History must not be forgotten, as characters…
Very impressive both in its framing and lightinng and how it uses that to push for rendering an experience at outskirts of modernization. As seem to often happen with African movies that deal with this subject matter the way it relates the relations between individualism, community and space are very refreshing.
BEST FILM OF 2021.
It marks out Mosese as a notable new voice in African cinema. It comes to us from Lesotho, that small independent country landlocked within South Africa, and stars the late Mary Twala, who gives a searing, fierce performance.
It holds nothing back: Not aesthetics, not performance, not tone or sensation. Mosese composes his film as one part tone poem, one part scathing political critique, one part dirge and one part memorial, because death is a complex beast.
Saying goodbye hurts, especially when you’re the last one left, like Mantoa. But This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, in between the sound of grief that’s somehow inchoate and eternal, finds the space to celebrate life through…
A imagem com que Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese abre seu filme é muito simbólica, mas só vai ganhar sentido ao longo de "Isso Não É um Enterro, É Uma Ressurreição": em câmera lenta, vemos a imagem borrada de um guerreiro, armado com uma lança, atacar alguém em cima de um cavalo. A cena aparentemente não tem relação com a história que virá a seguir, mas, nestes poucos segundos, o diretor resgata uma herança de resistência ao invasor. Mosese mora em Berlim, mas nasceu no Lesoto, um pequeno reino encravado no meio da África do Sul, e é para lá que ele voltou para rodar seu segundo longa-metragem.
A personagem principal do filme é Mantoa, uma mulher de 80 anos que mora…
Holy shit. Watched this film for the first time this morning, and it's already broken into my Top 200 of All Time. Never seen anything quite like it. Only the 3rd (I think) feature film by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. Might even be the first film in the Sotho language I've seen. Every single second of this delivered some type of catharsis - even when making us sit in a moment.
A Japanese musician, Yu Miyashita, did the score (he and the director are both Berlin based). The music plays a subtle, yet key element in the immersion and stunning beauty found here. The structure and presentation are unique, to say the least, so many mainstream audiences might find this…
“And when I stand up, I am just waiting for the time to arrive so I can lie down again.”
Maybe grief isn’t a phase but a lifelong process. Waiting, enduring until you can be with them again.
The cinematic language is strong in this one. The film plays out like a series of vignettes, capturing the physical frailty and mental determination of an octogenarian as she decides to plan for her own burial, except the land of her community and ancestral burial is at stake with plans for a new dam to be built at the same site.
A visual treat, an exquisite string of images with a catalogue of compositions that are so striking artistically. Shots with the skies dominating the composition and pale green tones are prevalent, resonating with the lead character’s desire for an escape from earthly bounds, the grief and senseless suffering as she describes it in her meaningless existence, having lost all…
