Ancestral Visions of the Future

From the dusty gravel roads where he played with toy wire cars as a seven-year-old to the dispassionate streets of exile where he dissolved into anonymity, the director confronts the moments that shattered and shaped him. The film is also an elegy for a city and a people caught between the weight of memory and the inevitability of loss.

Ancestral Visions of the Future is first and foremost a filmmaker’s look at a landscape, that of his country, Lesotho, a territory that is both the lost paradise of childhood – with its wonders and promises – and a space of violence – stemming from the colonial past and anchored in a present on fire.
A psychological and physical territory of exuberant beauty, dreamlike and factual, fantasised and experienced in the flesh. The filmmaker in exile, faced with his own history and that of his country, is in search of both a memory and a future.
Exceeding the limits of realism to the point of strangeness, he presents an entirely subjective representation of the world, introspective, fragmented and brutal, where everything always seems to be in the process of breaking down. It’s a reality that shifts our vision of the world, and yet resonates with a question we all ask: what do we have to lose in order to become?

Catherine Bizern