The Sunday Mail
Takudzwa Chihambakwe —
POPULAR Star FM radio presenter, Phathisani Sibanda, is spreading his wings in entertainment circles as he tries out acting. The hilarious host of Star FM’s 326 Express alongside KVG, plays lead in an upcoming movie titled “Camouflage”.
“The whole acting experience was a lot of fun for me,” said Phathisani, adding, “Our director, Adoration Bizure was really good. He knew how to take us through each scene till we had sunk in our characters and executed everything to perfection. He was really patient with some of us who were new to acting.”
Phathisani, however, hinted that there were some strange moments for him whilst on set.
“There were some weird moments for me as a first timer, especially when it came to kissing. It is a whole different scenario when you kissing on set and when it is happening between you and your loved one.
“In the latter it’s all about the chemistry and everything naturally flows, but in the former case it is a bit tough because after you have had an exhaustive day on set, the director would then suddenly say it’s time for the kissing scene and most of the time I was not prepared. Overall it was weird fun I must say,” reflected Phathisani.
Could this be the beginning of Phathisani’s acting career?
“Anything can happen hey, life always presents us with a lot of options. I can’t say yes or no but anything is possible,” he responded.
The 90-minute long movie also features a host of other prominent faces among them Davies Mugadza, 2017 Nama Best Male Actor, Anthony Tongani, commercial model, Gina Mutemeri and Kingdom Embassy leader, Prophet Passion Java.
Movie director, Adoration Bizure, revealed that the movie will be dropping end of July.
“Am really excited about this production as it took us a while to get the job done owing to financial constraints. We are now done with shooting and all the other technical elements are just being fined tuned. The movie will be released at a red carpet event at the Ambassador Hotel at the end of July 2017,” he revealed.
He also added that working with a host of popular individuals was a deliberate strategy to get more people interested in the product.
“I chose to work with a lot of popular individuals on this project because we want to get the huge numbers that are associated with these individuals to buy into this project, hence we have a robust market to sell the product to when it is released,” he said.
The film will be distributed in all the country’s 10 provinces the day after its premiere. Bizure highlighted that this movie will be a “way much better offering” than his debut 2015 offering, “Deception”.
“I have no doubt that ‘Camouflage’ is certainly a better production than ‘Deception’. We corrected all the mistakes we did in our first movie. We improved on scriptwriting, sound and picture quality as well as the acting.
“However, it took us longer to complete the production for ‘Camouflage’ compared to ‘Deception’ owing to serious financial constraints. We had no budget at all and this resulted in us taking a good 18 months to finish the job compared to the eight months we spent on ‘Deceptions’,” Bizure pointed out.
However, one worrying factor is that Bizure takes up most of the key roles in this movie. He was the writer, director, and producer.
This often compromises quality in other productions but Bizure disagrees: “My having to multitask due to lack of funding does not affect the quality of the product because I had associates who assisted me.”
“Camouflage” is a film based on the life of a rich female real estate owner Tanya (Gina Mutemeri), who had faced heart breaks and disappointments ever since she was a teenager.
Being a church girl she was close to her Pastors and they wanted Tanya to get married to one of them at her church but she lost hope in dating church guys.
She then meets a “worldly” guy who had visited her work place buying one of her houses.
Though she never got to spend time with the guy, Denzel (Phathisani Sibanda), she got attracted to him and decided to swap her CEO position at the estate agency and work for Denzel as a maid in order to get close to him.
When solicited for the job from Denzel, he told her he could only employ her if she had a husband who was ready to also work as a gardener at the house, Tanya then engaged her gardener at her company who had to disguise himself as her husband.
