The Forgotten Kingdom finally comes home

Mohalenyane Phakela

Maseru

A cast and crew premiere of the award-winning movie, The Forgotten Kingdom, will  be held at Ster–Kinekor Theatres in Maseru on Saturday next week.

The premiere will be followed by a two-week road-show in all the villages of Lesotho in which some of the movie-scenes were shot.

The Forgotten Kingdom was shot in both Lesotho and South Africa in 2011, with its cast drawn from the two neighbouring countries. The majority of the scenes were in Lesotho villages such as Semonkong, Ha Seetsa, Sefikeng, Mokhotlong, Roma, Sani Top, and Morija.

The movie is about a young Mosotho (Atang, played by South Africa’s Senzo Nqobe), who leaves the hustle of Johannesburg and returns to his ancestral land, Lesotho, to bury his alienated father in the remote village where he was born. Stirred by the memories of his childhood, Atang falls madly in love with his childhood friend, Lineo, who is now a schoolteacher.

It is through Lineo that Atang is drawn towards the mystical beauty and hardships experienced by his ‘forgotten’ community, and experiences the transformation of the land he had chosen to forget.

According to the movie’s American writer/director, Andrew Mudge, the intention was to make a film that was “primarily visual, told through the colours of the land and the faces of the Basotho people.”

Mudge further says the experience of discovering “this mostly overlooked country called Lesotho was like finding something exquisitely beautiful and unique.”

The film has so far been shown in countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Italy and South Africa, but is yet to debut in Lesotho.

The movie has won eleven international awards and was officially selected at 10  festivals, among them the prestigious Seattle International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival and Durban Film Festival.