Barbican Special Screening: 'This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection' with introduction by Onyeka Igwe, 19 October 2026
To celebrate 2026 Moving Image Book Award winner, Onyeka Igwe, and her book, ‘June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive’, KKF is pleased to be presenting a special screening in partnership with the Barbican on the 19th October.
Special screening of ‘This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection’ (15*)
With Introduction by Onyeka Igwe
Monday 19th October, 7pm
Cinema 1, Barbican
Followed by a drinks reception and book signing
In this poetic, critically acclaimed drama, director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese explores what home and tradition mean when a village’s existence is threatened by the forces of progress.
Set among the mountains of landlocked Lesotho, the film follows Mantoa, an 80-year-old widow who is preparing for the end of her life. She puts her affairs in order and makes arrangements for her burial.
But when her village is threatened with forced resettlement to make way for a reservoir, Mantoa finds a new reason to live. She brings her community together and inspires them to resist.
In the final dramatic moments of her life, Mantoa’s courage transforms her into a legend, ensuring that her story will live on.
- Release year: 2019
- Country of origin: Lesotho / South Africa / Italy
- Director: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
- Sotho with English subtitles
- Runtime: 2hrs
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories . The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound.
On June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive by Onyeka Igwe (published by Lawrence Wishart)
“The judges valued the depth of engagement with a worthy topic, the richness of the collated oral histories and film festival ephemera, and the fact that this book is itself an act of radical archiving; helping to further June Givanni’s life’s work by preserving the vitality of Pan-African Cinema for future generations to come.”
Ellen E Jones, Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award Judge 2026