[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

It only takes a few seconds into Ancestral Visions of the Future to perceive that it is a markedly different work from Lemohang Mosese’s two breakout features from 2019: the epistolary essay Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. and the community portrait This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. To be sure, there is a remarkable continuity of thematic concerns across the three films by this Lesotho-born, Berlin-based artist, chiefly the fraught political and religious history of his home country, its spiritual amnesia and its desolate present mired in crime and violence.

But while Mosese’s earlier outings were framed through designated points of view — an unnamed letter writer in Mother and a diegetic storyteller in Resurrection — the new work is direct in its address and features a first-person voiceover by the filmmaker himself. Dense and florid, this voiceover lends the film the texture of a highly stylised poetic memoir. We learn, for instance, that Mosese’s mother always fought for a better life, dreaming of a comfortable home for her children and “stubbornly refusing to greet the hand of permanence”.

Yet Visions ventures beyond the confessional mode, unfurling alternatingly as a personal essay about the filmmaker’s native country and as a fragmentary fiction involving symbolic characters. Prominent among these is Sobo (Sobo Bernard), a healer-puppeteer who preserves the nation’s pre-colonial consciousness, and Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a wandering woman who stands up to the ominous gangland cars that zip through the streets and leave bloodshed in their wake. Through these characters, Mosese constructs a layered assessment of his homeland, marked both by an appreciation for its bygone splendours and a profound disillusionment with its current-day perversions.

This ambivalence is echoed by Mosese’s own feelings as an artist in exile, someone whose work revolves around questions of memory and identity, yet whose own identity remains in flux. Steering clear of nostalgia, Visions refuses to separate fond recollections of the past from their material reality. At one point, for example, Mosese speaks of falling in love as a child with cinema in a hall that also reeked of human waste.

Evocative of the words in the voiceover, but never merely illustrative, the imagery of Visions weaves together impressionistic documentary footage with surreal, Sergei Parajanov-like tableaux. The film’s slightly oblique visual organisation expands the oral descriptions while also opening up secondary associations between sound and image. The resulting work hovers entrancingly between the familiar and the strange, reality and myth, fact and metaphor.