259. Lesotho’s film director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s second feature film “This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection”(2019), based on his original script: One of the most remarkable films from the African Continent

 

“Let the dead bury the dead, you shall leave no trace. Bury your existence, lest they say there lived a sufferer. The soul-less march of time has surrounded you, like an old cloth turned into a dry beetle. The (church) bells speak when people can’t. Little children cheer up. The dead buried their own dead. You will do so in future. You can hear the church bells under the water”

---words of a song sung in the opening sequence, where the time stamp is revealed by the electricity that lights up the room (the rest of the film is lit by candles). The song is sung, aided by a Lesiba, “an unbraced mouth resonated bow,” by the film’s actor Jerry Mofokeng

 

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is one of the best directors from the African continent today, if not a wider geographical area, and his 2019 film This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection testifies that fact. How original is the tale of the film depends on whether he had seen a remarkable US film Northfork (2003) directed by Mark Polish with an original script written by the brothers Mark and Michael Polish. The essential similarity between the two are limited to the impending acquisition of land to make way for a man-made lake, the shadow of forcible relocation of the inhabitants of a town/village, a Christian priest (Nick Nolte, in the Polish film; Makhaola Ndebele in Mosese’s film) who provides spiritual succor, and relocation of buried remains of the dead before the waters are released. Both are remarkable films. In both films, we have inhabitants resisting change. In both films, the villagers/townsfolk battle powerful wealthy capitalist groups who promise a better life if the inhabitants agree to move out.  Unlike Polish’s film that focused on diverse characters in a town, in Mosese’s film, the focus is on a single inhabitant--an 80-year-old  widow named Mantoa (Mary Twala Mlongo, who is stunning in this film) mourning currently her son’s death and his burial. Similar to the work of the Polish brothers, there is a priest in Mosese’s film to comfort her spiritually but Mosese goes a step beyond the American film, he brings in sheep as non-human mourners in a twist of magic realism to comfort a widow whose house was once burnt in a fire that consumed all her possessions and, possibly, her bedridden husband. To capture the movement of the animals from an overhead shot was a masterstroke, reminding one of Terrence Malick’s shot of grazing wild bison surrounding the lead actors in To The Wonder (2012).

Mantoa played by Mary Twala Mlongo, who won
5 Best Actress Awards at various international
film festivals for this role

The opening song sung with a Lesiba
(the room has electrical lights)

Death and burial are important elements of spiritual and social discussion in This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection. The film begins with Mantoa mourning the death of her son who had been working in a mine in neighboring South Africa, that landlocks Lesotho. The script of Mosese reveals in fits and starts that Mantoa has lost her bedridden husband, her daughter and her granddaughter. Her cumulative grief is relieved for a while by the consoling words of the Christian priest quoting the Bible passages. Yet this only leads to a crisis of faith in the strong Mantoa, who merely impassively listens to the hymn “Abide with me” sung in the local language by members of another burial procession passing by her hut. Mantoa is preparing for her own death and burial in the background of the imminent “death and burial” of her “weeping” village called Nasarethe (a variant of Nazareth, the town Jesus grew up in the Bible) under the waters of the proposed lake.  Mantoa calls all the womenfolk of the village and gives guidelines on her own burial reminding one of Abbas Kiarostami’s quest for a suitable person to bury his fictional character Badil in the 1997 Golden Palm winner at Cannes, The Taste of Cherry. For Mantoa, her death is certain and around the corner and her burial wishes will be complied with; for Badil, his plan is dependent on future intangibles. Mosese presents Mantoa, a woman of strong will and character, a ‘Mother Courage,’ who pays a villager in advance to dig her grave next to her husband’s and son’s graves.

Mantoa grieves her losses to a fire sitting on
a charred bed while sheep magically
surround her as co-mourners

After the fire, the rebuilt elegant hut of Mantoa
(note the art direction/production design)

Mosese’s film presents an unforgettable mix of script, visuals and sounds that are rarely captured so effectively and evocatively in a film. Almost every shot in the film, often wordless, express the affinity of Mantoa to her immediate surroundings that goes beyond the cemetery, the church with its well-described historic bell, and the dead bodies buried in the graves. The colorful attires of Mantoa indoors are regal and yet simple. The exterior shots silently describes the single individual swallowed up by the vast well-endowed land that produce useful flora for the humans and feed for the sheep, not to mention the rainwater that blesses the country.

Mantoa in mourning attire
(note the candles.)

Mantoa, in better times, (note the rich colors.)

 (In reality, not stated in the film, the multi-million dollar Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which commenced in 1986 with the help of the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Investment Bank, captures stores and transfers water and generated electricity to South Africa, earning Lesotho hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually.)   

The typical cinematography of the film, accentuating
Mantoa's stature against larger forces,
of rainwater from the clouds that can bring
prosperity and the cemeteries that will go under water 

 

Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, as the director, screenplay writer and editor has made Lesotho and Africa proud with his second feature film winning plaudits all over the globe.  African cinema is on the march while showing indirectly the effect of development in the region.

P.S.  This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection has won 20 awards worldwide at film festivals including Athens, Durban, Hong Kong, Kerala, Montreal, Reykjavik, Sundance, and Taipei international festivals. At the Kerala festival (IFFK) it was chosen the Best Film in competition. Five of these awards were for Mary Twala Mlongo as the Best Actress at the respective events. At IFFK, too, the late Mary Twala Mlongo earned a Special Mention. The film participated at the Denver film festival,  This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection is one of the author's best films of 2020. Mark Polish’s film Northfork (2003) and Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), mentioned above, have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in the post-script to access the reviews.)

252. Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s debut feature film “Chetyre” (4) (2004), based on a script by post-modern author/dramatist Vladimir Sorokin: A perplexing, absurdist, and depressing study of contemporary, post-glasnost Russia

“Exhausted by hunger, he ate in secret. He thought he was stealing food; but that was better than stealing from strangers”  

-- Narrator of a TV program on dogs, viewed by Oleg in the film 4

The film 4 was made in 2004 and won 11 major film awards across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Khrzhanovskiy’s  debut film 4 is no ordinary feature film. Four stray dogs on a Moscow street at night open the film. Four persons (3 customers and a bartender) accidentally meet at a bar late night. The three drinkers (Marina, a female prostitute; Vladimir, a male piano tuner/musician; and Oleg, a male wholesale-meat supplier) construct their alternate fictional professions as they consume alcohol and attempt connecting with each other. 

Bar scene: (left to right) Vladimir, Marina and Oleg

As the film progresses, we realize Marina is one of 4 sisters. Marina (played by actress Marina Vovchenko) meets up with two of her other sisters (possibly played by her real life sisters, if we go by their surnames and physical similarity) in her village. The fourth sister has just passed away. Marina travels with three strangers in a train compartment (they too add up to four). Asked by one of her co-passengers about where she is heading, she responds “To shoot a grenade launcher—my psychiatrist’s advice to clear the head. It helps against suicide.” More allegories, more symbols, more absurd connections. The person who asked her the question returns much later in the film as a thief stealing a watch from a car-accident site.

At the early bar sequence, the conversation among the three drinkers are about dogs and humans, after Marina curses a man who has run over a dog at night. “A dog’s life is shit,” says one. “Man’s life is shit” is the terse response. “A dog’s life is comfortable, actually” is a follow-up comment from Oleg, the wholesale-meat seller. “Hit a dog on the road and bad luck follows you; hit a man and good luck follows,’’ adds Oleg. “Dogs are closer to God,” says Vladimir, implying thereby that humans are comparatively less close to God.

"Dogs are closer to God"
Four stray dogs on a Moscow street open the film

Dogs are everywhere, following all the characters--at the meat factory, at the village to eat up the dolls (made up of chewed bread!), following the thief who robs a watch off the hand of Oleg, who has just minutes ago crashed his car in an effort to save a stray dog crossing the road (Oleg, at the bar scene earlierin the film, had professed his love for dogs, constituting an Aristotelian structural balance to end the meandering script of 4).

There is a Muslim, who sells meat of bizarre round piglets (genetically modified?) and kicks a dog (both animals that devout Muslims avoid dealing with) and is promptly reprimanded for his action by the non-Muslim Oleg, who loves dogs and watches dog programs on TV at home, surrounded by spic and span dog statues and stuffed dogs,.

Four planes take off with prisoners (including Valdimir) forcibly trained to be soldiers to fight at some unknown frontier. What’s this strange fascination with the number 4? In one of the comments made at the bar, Vladimir ironically states that 4 legs lend stability to a table.

Old women of the village mourn at the fresh grave
of Marina's sister

Marina’s village reminds one of the derelict world of Tarkovsky's film Stalker. The population of the village is strange. It is surrounded by barbed wires and caution notices warning trespassers of high-tension electrical cables. But Marina knows how to navigate those barriers. The village seems to have survived in a time warp, complete with imposing but closed Russian orthodox churches and where the poor aged inhabitants sing hymns at burials and sell weird dolls to survive. There is just one male in the village, otherwise populated by females. Most of the women are toothless and old. Even in their advanced age, they talk of sex and continue to be proud of their breasts, when inebriate with vodka. The only two young female inhabitants of the village are Marina’s siblings and one of them has just died and had been adept at making the dolls.  En route to her village, Marina passes a truck/shop storing the genetically modified round piglets. (Everything in the film script is connected, if you are observant!) The odd male in the all-female village commits suicide after perfecting the faces of the last four dolls, using up all his savings. 

There is a strange connect between the muddy exteriors of Marina’s village and the mysterious mud that gathers on Moscow streets as though there has been a recent flood that require truck-based bulldozers to clear the detritus.

The sole male inhabitant of the village
carry four unfinished dolls (note the mud)

Thus the film 4 presents you with animals who behave like humans and human beings who behave like animals. Some of the animals are alive, others are now dead carcasses. And some of the carcasses are possibly the result of banned/mad/state-supported scientific experiments to be sold as prized meat to high-end restaurants that exist but do not seem to have much patronage/clientele.

Just a few minutes into the film and any intelligent viewer will know that the tale is a political allegory of Russia today. 

As this writer reviews the film 4 during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the shrill video messages of Wuhan residents pleading for global help are recalled. In 4, stray dogs are suddenly disturbed by sudden arrival of earth-moving equipment to redo a Moscow street at night that did not seem to require major repairs or reconstruction. The dogs and humans in Russia (and now in Wuhan, China) are at the mercy of forces that are incomprehensible to the respective denizens. And yet life trudges on, in an absurdist reality that reminds you of Ionesco's plays.

Vladimir, who was observing fishes, turtles and strange water eels in glass water-tanks, in the film 4 is picked up by the police off the street and later interned in a prison camp and forcibly re-trained to be a soldier to be packed off like hundreds of others to fight an unknown national enemy in 4 huge aircrafts.

The well-to-do Oleg has a father Misha who was/is a scientist constantly worried about dangerous microbes and is a fanatic for health safety to the extent of washing his garbage cans each day. Misha loves his dead wife and wants to visit his wife’s grave with his son Oleg. Misha is a scientist who firmly believes in the power of hell. This is where Vladimir Sorokin’s contribution surfaces as the novelist/playwright/scriptwriter is apparently a devout Christian, getting baptized at 25 and refusing to join the Komsomol, the youth communist cadre. Sorokin subsequently won the People’s Booker prize and other international prizes with his works translated from Russian into more than 20 languages. Sorokin’s tongue-in-cheek aside in 4 that perhaps only die-hard chess enthusiasts will spot includes the names of famous Russian chess players Bronstein and Lukin, dropped nonchalantly by Vladmir at the bar scene as the names of famous genetic engineering scientists in the tale he fabricates.

There are visuals of streets getting cleaned in 4 by water-spraying trucks and bulldozers clearing mud. At the end of the film, you do see a cleaned-up road. But ironically who is using this clean facility? A dirty thief and a stray dog. No detail in this film is non-allegorical. When the village women eat and relish the meat of a dead pig, there is food for thought. When the pig’s head is thrown into a pig sty for other pigs to hog, there is food for thought. When dolls made of chewed bread are eaten by stray dogs, there is food for thought.

These are just some fascinating elements of the film (script by Vladimir Sorokin). Does the film belong to the director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy (his debut feature film) or to Sorokin or to both? The film is audacious and critical of modern Russia, reminding one at times of Joseph Heller's book Catch 22, subsequently made into a feature film by director Mike Nichols. Somewhere, the mad script of 4 comes together. It reminds one of another nihilistic recent debut film--this time from China—Bo Hu's An Elephant Sitting Still (2018). Only Bo Hu committed suicide soon after making his film, while Khrzhanovskiy has finally made his second film. The film 4 could well have had an alternate fitting title “4 dogs not sitting still," on the lines of Bo Hu’s film.

P.S.  Bo Hu’s debut film An Elephant Sitting Still (2018), a film critical of modern China was reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of the Chinese film in this post-script to access the review.). The film 4 won awards at the Antalya Golden Orange film festival in Turkey (Best Director), the Athens international film festival in Greece (City of Athens award), the Buenos Aires international film festival of independent cinema in Argentina (Best Director), the Golden Apricot Yerevan international film festival in Armenia (Jury Special Prize), Rotterdam international film festival in the Netherlands (Golden Cactus and Tiger awards), Seattle international film festival in USA (New Directors Showcase award), Sochi Open Russian film festival in Russia (Jury Special Prize), Titanic international film festival in Budapest, Hungary (Breaking Waves award), Transilvania international film festival in Romania (Transilvania trophy and Best Cinematography) and Valdiva international film festival in Chile (Best Soundtrack). Some 15 years later, the film’s director Khrzhanovskiy has made his second ambitious and controversial feature film DAU in 2019. The DAU film project also has writer Sorokin of 4 to prop up Khrzhanovskiy.