Sundance Prizewinner Lemohang Mosese Wraps Production on ‘Ancestral Visions,’ Heads to Venice’s Final Cut

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Sundance prizewinner Lemohang Mosese is in post-production with his fourth feature film, “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” which he’ll be presenting during the Venice Production Bridge’s Final Cut pics-in-post workshop for films from Africa and the Arab world.

The film is described as “a deeply personal exploration of identity, childhood, death and exile through the eyes of a puppeteer, a mother, a boy, a farmer and a city.” Pitched as an “allegorical essay,” it centers on a puppeteer in a marketplace in an anonymous African town who wants the locals to return to their ancestral ways.

An herbalist, preacher and erstwhile prophet, the puppeteer “preaches to [the villagers] about beauty, about what people can become,” Mosese tells Variety. “He wants to prolong their lives, because he believes that human life is so magnificent but so short — they live such a short life span to correct the mistakes of their predecessors. “[But] the city becomes cruel to him.

Like many people, the city puts a yoke around them and crushes them into the earth.” The director describes “Ancestral Visions” as his most autobiographical film to date and an attempt to create something whole from the “fragmented memory of my past.” “It’s the closest thing to how I think, and it’s the…closest thing to my life, to the actual events that happened in my childhood,” he says.