Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese was born and raised in Hlotse, a market town in the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho near the South African border. Today Mosese lives in Berlin, where he’s lived for over a decade. Described by the filmmaker as a ‘lament,’ Mother, I Am Suffocating… explores the complexities of his relationship to his native country. It offers a broader meditation on the legacies of colonialism and Christianity in Africa, and a startling vision of hope for the continent’s rebirth. Addressing a mother figure who embodies the idea of home, the reading of a raw and affecting letter unfolds over an elegiac procession of stark black-and-white images brimming with symbolic resonance and poetic sensibility. The narration shimmers with stolen memories and open wounds, and a sense of inchoate rage and longing, as it shifts from a personal farewell to a profound commentary on identity, memory, displace- ment, and the complex relationship between individual and nation. These are themes Lemohang Mosese has continued to explore in his subsequent films, particularly in his latest, Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025). According to the filmmaker, “the film could be set anywhere, it could be set in Paris just as well as in a village near Beirut. It speaks about people who live on the margins of a society that is new to them, but who do not yet really belong there. It is about people who love and simultaneously despise their homeland.”
“I am a part of Berlin but I know I don’t belong there, I belong to Lesotho and yet I am not a part of it. I am spaceless. I create better from this formless state because I can see better as an outsider. Creating art from this state of mind is rewarding but it has made me a lost person. I wouldn’t have been able to see my country or Africa as a whole if I was inside it. It took me to be an ‘outsider’ to see the tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness of it all.”
