FRÉDÉRIC SALLES
This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection : Cinema without the weight of perfection.
I just arrived home after watching the film in the only theatre that screens it in my hometown Marseille… This film reconciled me with cinema, no less. It touches me even more than Parasite, that was the last film I really enjoyed in a movie theatre. This is the kind of movie that makes you see the future of world cinema through an optimistic lens. A lens that I once thought irremediably cracked. The film is not flawless but just as a Godard film would do to me, and it never bothers me, rather the opposite actually. It has the cinematographic approach about landscape close to a Kiarostami but without the weight of perfection. I have not been mesmerized by a zoom shot like several in this film since… centuries. So Godard for sound and Kiarostami for photography, but above all its own voice for the spiritual earthshake it tackles. I absolutely loved the fact that it does not invoke any kind of phantasmagoric or magical argument, just pure poetry and your senses get to take you along the spiritual paths the characters literally walk on.
I am very happy to read Jannous Aukema’s text,
“To be sure, this is not merely a film, this is a birthing of some new and primordial creative resistance, that finds its articulation through the profound cadences of pain, elation, protest, spirituality, ancestry, and the very soil we stand on. This is the coming of the filmmakers we deserve. This is the coming of the filmmakers we need. I have never felt more free to create film in this place than I do now. From the bottom of my heart I thank you Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, you have given us all something of inexplicable value.”
because its author shows me that the film resonates where I believe it counts the most, where the future of African cinema is. Shit I don’t know how to write it but I just mean my pleasure in watching the film was great, but the feeling that the film will open up the future of African cinema was even more important to me.
If you feel like you lost faith in Cinema, if you wander around desperately on streaming platforms or in movie theatres in search of a future for African Cinema … please try to watch This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection by seSotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese.
Pierre De Villiers won the BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY AWARD at Fespaco for This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection.
3 awards for This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection at JCC Carthage Film Festival
Best Editing
Best Cinematography
Silver Tanit for Best Film