LIAS Film Series: "Ancestral Visions of the Future"
21. May
Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is present.
Date: Thursday, 21 May 2026, 7 p.m.
Place: SCALA Arthouse Cinema, Apothekenstraße 17, Lüneburg
Introduction: Grace Musila (LIAS alumna, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
In his poetically condensed yet highly subjective film Ancestral Visions of the Future, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese develops a multi-layered reflection on uprooting, exile and the ongoing negotiation of belonging. The world premiere took place in 2025 as part of the Berlinale Special section at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Through a deliberately fragmented narrative and a dense, mythically charged visual language, Mosese links autobiographical memory work with universal questions of home, loss and identity. Spanning from his childhood in Lesotho to his life in exile in Berlin, a dreamlike cinematic topography unfolds, moving between past and present, individual experience and collective memory.
The film operates with symbolically heightened character constellations: for instance, a puppeteer who seeks redemption through the cultivation of herbs, or a market woman who preserves the language of dreams in an urban environment marked by amnesia. In parallel, Mosese reconstructs formative biographical moments – the dust-choked streets of his childhood, experiences of violence, and the existential anonymity of exile.
Ancestral Visions of the Future thus transcends the framework of a purely autobiographical narrative and can be read as a cinematic homage to a city and a community situated at the crossroads between the burden of a culture of remembrance and inevitable loss. Inspired by oral storytelling traditions and underpinned by a distinctive visual aesthetic, Mosese unfolds a work of emotional and poetic intensity. At the same time, the film serves as a reflection on cinema’s epistemic and affective power to visualise memory and open up imaginary spaces of belonging.
France / Lesotho / Germany / Qatar / Saudi Arabia, 2025 • Director: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 90 mins • Original English version
Free Admission
