This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection's poetic Lesotho imagery takes the big screen at The Cinematheque August 18 to 23
Film tells the story of an elderly widow’s stand against the resettlement of her village
The Cinematheque screens This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection on August 18, 20, 21, and 23.
PAINTERLY IMAGES tell a poetic story about the state of our planet, as This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection makes a deserved return to the big screen at The Cinematheque this week.
As we said in our review when the film streamed earlier this year on small screens during lockdown, Lesotho writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese has a way with visual storytelling. He plays wide-skied landscapes off closeups of the widow Mantoa’s grief-lined face set against a deep cobalt wall, or her gnarled hands making circles in the mud. Occasionally, we see a mysterious storyteller who’s lit like a Rembrandt portrait.
In what’s been called her greatest part, the late Soweto-born actor Mary Twala gives an almost wordless performance as Mantoa, an old villager who has lost her last child to a mining accident. With little left to lose, she stands her ground against a dam that will obliterate her Lesotho village, and force resettlement to the city—not just for the living, but the buried dead.
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection ends up feeling artful and cutting-edge, while ancient and steeped in myth.
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