This is not a Burial, it is a Resurrection

 On a fundamental level, This is not a Burial; it is a Resurrection (Burial/Resurrection) doesn't make much sense.  The story, although simple enough in structure, is complicated with digressions and odd discontinuities -- we can't tell whether the plot encompasses a few days or several months (or, even, years).  There are striking shots that seem radically disconnected from the sequence of events and rupture the mise-en-scene. As a matter of graphic design, the picture is full of pictures that I couldn't decipher -- in particular, there is an image of some sort of small animals, possibly chicks, clustered together in a kind of flattened furry ball -- the shot is held for ten seconds but I had no idea what it depicted.  Scenes are stitched together from about four or five different locations that don't cohere into any plausible landscape.  The story concerns a town several hours remote from an unnamed capitol city -- but the town sometimes consists of one stone hut with a thatched roof; at other times, the town has a big church but no homes.  There are no establishing shots and we don't ever see anything that looks like a town or, even, a village.  There are lots of people around but we don't know where they come from.  The musical score is like the soundtrack of a Godard movie -- there are sudden bursts of florid orchestral music, choirs singing discordantly off-screen, and a wheezing, tapping sound that doesn't seem to be music at all until we find that the noise comes from an old man in a bar playing an instrument that consists, apparently, of a reed and tube -- this is music at its lowest possible level of organization, a twitching pulse that, at first, sounds like a rusty door hinge in duet with a chirping cricket.  Furthermore, the topography contradicts the plot -- Burial/Resurrection concerns the construction of a dam that is projected to flood the village where the story takes place.  But there's no stream running anywhere near the village, no water around at all, and the terrain is a bewildering labyrinth of steep, almost sheer, hillsides, distant mountains and sloping pastures.  Characters sometimes mention villages already under the waters impounded by the dam.  But we don't ever see anything like a reservoir or lake.  The audience expects to see a river with a dam under construction in a gorge of some kind.  Nothing of the kind is ever shown.  You have the sense that the film proceeds according to oneiric logic -- it's as if someone has dreamed that the land is submerged under water and that this is taken to be true and irreversible, except that there is no water ever visible. We are drowned, but not, perhaps, in anything like tangible, quotidian water -- the water and the deluge, it seems, may be purely notional, some kind of metaphor.  Burial/Resurrection is either staggeringly incompetent as a narrative film or indifferent to ordinary logic or, perhaps, intentionally confusing as an esthetic decision.  Certainly, it's an irritating film and one that is needlessly difficult to construe even on the most elemental level of who is doing what to whom.  

A village named Nasarethe (Nazareth) is scheduled for inundation as a result of the construction of a dam somewhere nearby.  This situation is not established until about a half-hour into the two hour film.  The picture commences with an utterly baffling image shot as a colorful speed-blur of a man being (barely) restrained from spearing a horse.  There is no explanation for the image.  We hear a weird, faint noise, a pulsing rasp and faint wheeze like a bag pipe.  The camera tracks through a mostly deserted tavern somewhere -- there's a hapless disco ball, a woman dancing by herself as if in a trance, some men guzzling beer who seem mostly inert, and, in a little alcove, an old man with huge bulging eyes playing some sort of primitive instrument (this accounts for the sound we have heard). Now and then, the old man mutters words, a kind of story, but it's mostly gibberish.  We learn that in Nasarethe, the "dead bury the dead" -- as stated by the man with the single-stringed tube-like instrument in the bar.  An old woman has lost her husband, daughter, and granddaughter -- they are all dead.   Then, the narrator tells us that the old woman's son, who worked in a dangerous mine somewhere, has been killed.  The old woman is named Mantoa and she is the film's protagonist.  She laments the death of her son at a funeral presided over by a morose clergyman, grief-stricken over the death of his own wife.  A choir of five women in ragged garments sings and the women sway a little to the music while mourners walk in a tight circle, stomping their feet next to the corpse covered in a shapeless white shroud.  The old woman goes to the graveyard, a hillside covered with knee-high cairns of pebbles and finds that the place is filthy with trash.  She complains to the village chief, a burly guy in a resplendent dashiki who is wearing a ridiculous-looking pointed hat.  The chief tells her that the village is going to be evacuated due to its imminent inundation by the reservoir waters.  Mantoa protests saying that her husband, daughter, granddaughter, and son are all buried in the graveyard soon to be flooded.  She remarks that the umbilical cords of infants are also buried in the environs and hundreds of placentas.  A little girl accompanies the old woman. (In the film's last shot, she glares at the camera, presumably an image representing the next generation of Africans.)  Mantoa tells the girl that the village is built on the "plain of weeping" --this is a place where people went to bury their dead, passing through the town in the throes of grief.  People who died in wars, industrial accidents, and due to a plague are all buried here.  The old woman tries to hire a grave-digger to dig her own grave -- she's tired of living and wants to die.  The gravedigger refuses -- it's said to be blasphemous and bad luck to dig a grave for someone who is yet living.  The old woman summons everyone in the town by shrieking a kind of keening threnody -- this is how people are called to a funeral.  Everyone gathers and the old woman tells them that they must protest the destruction of the town by the flood caused by the dam.  The pastor praises the town as being sufficient to the needs of its people.  He is half prostrate with grief over the death of his wife  Mantoa leads the villagers to the graveyard where they try to clean up the mess..  An old man who was thrown from a horse is dying.  Mantoa tends to him and carefully shaves his head.  Everyone says that the old man, who seems to be in a coma will recover, but it's pretty obvious that he is moribund.  Mantoa fixes the floor of her one-room stone hut with what seems to be a mixture of dung and mud.  The next night, someone burns down her hut.  We see her sitting on the burnt-out bed, just a mass of charred springs, while sheep gather around her.  (The village economy is based on herding sheep).  The mayor tells the townsfolk that everything changes, even the local gods. There is no way to resist "progress" which requires the destruction of the town. Later, a man plays an accordion while the peasants plow a field and sow seeds in the furrows.  A boy dances with joy at the spring planting.  Then, a shot rings out and he falls over dead.  The man who fell from the horse dies.  Before his funeral, the Chief admits that he burned down Mantoa's hut and also shot the boy -- the town must be evacuated, he says, weeping profusely.  A choir of women sings "Abide with Me" at the funeral of the old man.  From within his house, where a wake is underway, we see through open windows that the village is being evacuated -- people are walking with all their processions past the home and, in fact, some of the dead have been exhumed; they are being carried on stretchers.  Some kind of fight occurs and a man has to be restrained from stabbing a horse with a spear.  (This is the source of the spectacular opening shot.)  From time to time, a crew of men wearing yellow vests and hard-hats are glimpsed in the background.  These men are now chopping down a woods. Everyone in town follows the Chief as the people abandon the village.  But, suddenly, Mantoa turns around, walks against the flow of the sad refugees, and begins to strip off her clothing.  When she is naked, we see her from the rear marching defiantly toward the men who are cutting down the forest.  The screen shows the girl who has accompanied Mantoa and, then, goes black.  The viewer wonders why there isn't any closure as to the scenes with the old hyper-thyroidal man in the bar who is seemingly narrating (albeit elliptically) the story as he sings and plucks at his instrument.  At the very end of the credits, the circle closes with the faint sound of the rasping instrument sounding plaintively as an accompaniment to the screen that is now black.

Apparently, the workmen hacking down the forest is some sort of synecdoche for the destruction of the village under the waters impounded by the dam.  The old woman repeatedly tries to die -- she dresses up in a garment that her husband gave her as a gift and lies down in her bed, but death won't come for her.  (After the fire, we see her gathering buttons and charred fragments of the elaborate dress from the ashes.)  When the grave-digger refuses to dig her grave, she takes a pick-axe and hacks out a hole in the hard earth.  Then, she squats in the trench trying to bury her head under the dirt -- but, of course, this effort at self-interment fails.  The old woman seems to symbolize the town -- the place is ghostly, death-infected, and impoverished, but it can't die.  Mantoa's resistance to "progress" as symbolized by the flood-waters, is quixotic -- the village is so remote, melancholy, and miserable, that's it's not clear to the viewer that it's worth saving.  (The town really exists only for the purpose of proving a way-station for people come to "the plains of weeping" to bury their dead.)  The place is even abandoned by God.  The narrator in the god-forsaken bar says that "the benevolence of God, once a cornerstone (to existence) has now become a stumbling block".

The movie was made in Lesotho, a kingdom in south Africa.  The terrain looks like the uplands in Peru around Cuzco -- it's a sort of barren cold heath; everyone wears stocking caps and mittens and we see their breath at times.  I can't divine to what extent we are supposed to take the events in the film literally or merely as symbols.  The Chief's confession, for instance, that he burned the old woman's house and, then, shot down the dancing boy at the planting festival doesn't elicit any consequences of any sort -- my guess is that his confession is to be taken as an allegory of the complicity of the leaders in the destruction of the small villages of this sort.  Some parts of the movie resist interpretation -- in one scene, a man goes berserk while sheering sheep in a kind of contest.  Why?  What does this mean?  The film is generally reviewed as being a paean to human solidarity and resistance with the old woman viewed as heroic in her defiance to the dam and reservoir.  This is a conventional, hopeful reading that bears no resemblance to what we see in the film.  Mantoa is half-crazed with grief and her final gesture of stripping off her clothes to confront the crew cutting down the trees seems a manifestation of madness as opposed to some form of political demonstration.  The town is a hell-hole and, in fact, all of its citizens seem pretty enthusiastic about vacating the place.  The picture is spectacularly shot with carefully composed long takes emphasizing figures moving in a desolate landscape.  We see all sorts of weather -- thunderstorms, fog, downpours of rain (and there's a discussion of snow in the mountains) -- the sky is full of luminous phenomena.  Mantoa seems to be allegorize the town -- she can't be killed and won't die.  The austere interiors and some of the gloomy scenes shot outdoors remind me of Pedro Costas but with picturesque nature cinematography of the sort featured in a film by Terance Malick. (Dovhenko's influence, particularly Earth, is also evident, particularly in the planting scenes.)  The director is  Lemohang Jeremial Mosese and this 2019 film was made in Lesotho.  Lesotho is a sovereign tribal enclave landlocked and surrounded on all sides by the Republic of South Africa.  The area is very mountainous, containing the highest peaks in the southern part of Africa.  Criterion has picked up this movie for issuance as a Blu-ray and I expect that Mosese will emerge as a very important filmmaker in the future -- assuming he can get funding for additional movies.  Burial/Resurrection is dull, but beautifully made; with a better script, the film would be a classic as opposed to a mere oddity.  Mantoa, with the profile of an old and fierce bulldog (her lower jaw juts out from her withered face) is played by Mary Kuksie Twale -- she died in 2020 but was a fixture of South African TV and films for many years.