When dying in peace means waging a private war
By Michael Phillips
It takes exactly two shots to establish the Berlin-based filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese as a serious spellbinder. And with his third featurelength project, “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection,” the director has put his homeland, the Southern Africa kingdom of Lesotho, on the map of world cinema.
Methodical, occasionally frustrating, but altogether hypnotic, it makes its streaming premiere April 9 as part of the Music Box Direct platform. Check out the trailer on YouTube.
So: What do we see in those first two shots?
We see villagers struggling to control a wild horse in streaky, otherworldly slow motion. Then, after the movie’s title comes and goes against a black background, we’re inside a village tavern. The camera pivots and circles; men smoke, or drink, or dance, while a disco ball twirls, listlessly, overhead.
In a slow and careful zoom, the camera focuses on a storyteller (Jerry Mofokeng Wa
Makhetha) sitting in a far corner. He plays the stringed wind instrument known as the lesiba. He tells of the woman we’re about to meet, an 80-yearold widow named Mantoa, awaiting the return of her son from a far-away gold mine.
But he won’t be coming home for Christmas. He has died, apparently on the job. “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” relays the gradual, slow-rising aftermath of this tragic news, as Mantoa waits for death herself, while coming to grips with what is happening to her village.
As our narrator explains, death has forgotten this woman, though the magnificent actor playing her, Mary Twala Mhlongo, ensures that we cannot. Also known as
Mary Twala (she appears in Beyonce’s 2020 video album “Black is King”), the South African legend died last year. This film is an indelible farewell, and though we say this sort of thing all the time, about all sorts of faces, hers is a face you’d follow anywhere, in any story.
The exterior conflict in writer-director Mosese’s drama is a familiar one, however unconventional the telling. Mantoa’s landlocked village, on the Senqu River, has been targeted for the construction of a new dam. This requires flooding what’s there — including the cemetery — and relocating the villagers.
Mantoa will have none of it. She goes about her own funeral preparations. The local priest, who works in a mid-19th century chapel built by French missionaries, offers his consolation. He, too, has lost his spouse. For a time his sermons meant nothing to him. Then he was led by God, he tells her, to a place of “total surrender, where faith, courage and will become obsolete.” Mantoa says nothing; total surrender is not in her blood.
Mosese’s film won a special Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the 2020 Sundance festival.
“This Is Not a Burial” was photographed in a boxlike 4:3 aspect ratio for good reason, Mosese told Film Comment: “The curse of shooting in Africa, because it is so beautiful, is that you can end up pigeonholing yourself within beauty. I don’t want the conversation to end in beauty. That’s why I chose the 4:3 ratio, because otherwise the movie would be way too beautiful and that would overshadow the story.” On the other hand: Mary Twala Mhlongo is the film’s story. And it contains multitudes.
real Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. mjphillips@chicagotribune.com