Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. (L. J. Mosese, 2019)

[TajSamKojiJesam]

The people on the dusty streets of Lesotho stare inquisitively at the young woman, who, like Jesus, carries a wooden cross on her back. She looks back into their faces, at mystically beautiful landscapes, a herd of sheep, and a pair of hands that knit unceasingly. What she sees is rendered more visually precise by the black and white, more abstract by the slowed-down images, it is filtered through memories. A raw voice-over – aware that it is not being heard by those being addressed – structures the flow of images into a cinematic lament.
In this essay film, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese succeeds in creating the chronicle of a radicalising sorrow, which steadily increases in scope from a personal farewell to the mother to a politically aware defection from the motherland. The painful process of shifting from an internal view of the small African country to an external one is visualised and commented on in a profoundly personal way – from the perspective of today, in exile, in Berlin.

MOTHER, I AM SUFFOCATING. THIS IS MY LAST FILM ABOUT YOU by L. J. Mosese | Clip | GeoMovies - YouTube

[Mothravka]

I was a bit disappointed when I saw it this summer. Might be because of the many slow motion scenes that I wasn't a big fan of. But I thought Mosese's other film from last year was much better, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019).