This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection

A tenacious elderly woman leads a community uprising in Lesotho’s striking first fiction feature film.

A lifelong resident of a tiny village in Lesotho, octogenarian widow Mantoa feels she has little left to live for after receiving news of her son’s untimely death in a South African goldmine. When government plans are announced to flood her ancestral hometown and resettle its inhabitants in order to make way for the construction of a dam, however, she finds renewed purpose, mobilising her neighbours to work together to resist their displacement.

Winner of Sundance 2020’s World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection – the first narrative feature to emerge from director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s homeland of Lesotho – melds documentary-like observation of daily work and local rituals with a bold, poetic aesthetic sensibility.

“The kind of myth-rooted, avant-garde Southern African storytelling that rarely cracks the international festival circuit … As classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.” – Variety