Reviewed by Dawid van der Merwe
What does it mean to die well when even your death is not your own?
In This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, Lesotho’s acclaimed filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese gives us Mantoa, an eighty-year-old widow who has buried her husband and children and longs only for her final rest. Mary Twala’s haunting performance captures a woman who seeks dignity not in grand gestures but in the quiet right to choose her own ending: to be laid to rest among her ancestors, in the soil that has carried her life.
That wish is denied. A government dam threatens to wash away her village and the graves of her kin. Mantoa’s grief hardens into resistance, and her personal mourning becomes a communal defiance. The film’s stark landscapes and silences turn loss into poetry, reminding us that death is not the enemy. The true enemy is the stripping away of choice.
For South Africans, this story resonates deeply. Mantoa’s struggle mirrors our own: the fight to have our voices heard in life’s final chapter. At DignitySA, we believe that to die well is to die on our terms, with autonomy, compassion, and respect.
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is more than a film. It is a call to honour the small but profound wishes of those at the end of life. Dignity is not granted, it is a right, and one worth defending until the last
