The Sunday Mail
WINNING a National Arts Merit Award (Nama) earlier this year for her movie “Mwanasikana” has fuelled Nakai Tsuro’s drive to create even better pictures. The talented filmmaker, who has been solidifying her presence in the motion picture industry is back with yet another scorcher.“Mwanasikana 2”, a sequel to the award winning movie, is set to hit the screens this August. While Diversion Zuze produced the movie, Tsuro wrote the script and directed the film, displaying her immense abilities in shepherding the cast and crew.
From the high definition picture quality to the unique shots, there is so much to admire in this motion picture. Shot in Domboshava, the filmmaker took advantage of the beautiful scenery, expertly manipulating the landscape in enhancing the production. In a chat with this writer, Tsuro shed more light on the film and preparations for the release.
“This film is about a girl who travels from the city to the village looking for her father – a father she has not known all her life. In the first part, on her quest to finding her father, ‘Tsitsi’, played by Tinashe Pundo gets stuck in another village after she is given help by a stranger she meets on the bus, ‘Kenny’ played by Boniface Chimedza.
“Her journey seems to be hopeless until Kenny’s friend, ‘Peter’, played by Simbarashe Mutanga, who knows Tsitsi’s village agrees to help with locating it,” narrated Tsuro.
The first installation started off with the struggles of a girl in a village she’s not welcome, as Tsitsi is seen as a threat by Kenny’s mother played by Nelia Mpofu who despises her because she feels her son wants to marry the city girl.
Things do not change much for Tsitsi as cruelty and hatred continues to haunt her in “Mwanasikana 2”. The movie reflects on the girl child who grows up without knowing her father and the challenges she has to face in life because of the situation.
“Mwanasikana has a very powerful girl child story of how most girls are growing up without knowing their biological fathers. This leads to problems and misfortunes in life as they grow up especially culturally in cases such as getting married and other procedures that might need a fatherly figure.
“In as much as we blame the mothers sometimes for not telling their children about their biological fathers due to the way their relationship would have ended, it is also the duty of fathers to be responsible and claim their fatherly rights to their children,” reasoned Tsuro.
She said she was inspired to write this script by the fact that girls are usually at a disadvantage when it comes to getting attention from their fathers while it is the opposite for the boy child.
“Coming up with this story line as a scriptwriter I felt that girls are the ones who suffer most in this sort of crisis, maybe because men are quick to say a child is theirs when it’s a boy and girls are usually the mother’s children.”
She said that despite working with a small budget, they had managed to come up with a better film than their previous production.
“Despite being a shoestring budget film due to lake of funding, the production is now much better in quality, from picture and sound and our director of photography, Diverson Zuze also worked hard on creating modern shots to match the international standards with the use of modern equipment like the Phantom 3 drone for aerial views.”
With the success of the first installation of the franchise, the pressure of coming up with a follow up project that would match the standards of the first one was immense.
“It was not easy coming up with a new storyline to the movie after the buzz the first one had made including winning an award because it meant that a lot of eyes are now looking and expecting more from the production.
“We came up with a whole new line up of actors in the sequel to add to the old cast to give depth to the film and the story line and personally I feel it just made the production stronger and better than before.”
Some of the actors who featured on the movie include Tendai Maduwa, Donald Kanyuchi, Faith Naphazi, Anthony Tongani, Macmillien Mukombachoto and Blessing Sibanda to name just a few.
Although the first movie fell victim to piracy, as has become the norm in the industry the world over, the response from the audience encouraged them to work harder on this project.
“Mwanasikana has had a good run as far as the audience is concerned and it was received very well and widely across the nation and abroad but unfortunately this was all through the hands of pirates.
“The only positive thing about it was that most of the people who have watched it wrote back to us directly as we had left contacts on the film and they are now waiting impatiently for the sequel. We are now working on getting better with our distribution this time around so that our audiences can experience the great quality of our original copies.”
The filmmakers have come up with a new way of distributing their movie on DVDs whereby they will deliver copies to the audience’s doorstep on request.
“We are going round with flyers to each doorstep and allow people to send us their order of the movie by just sending us their home address and we will then deliver their copy. This is like a pre-order method exercised in developed countries but the only difference is people will pay us upon delivery.
“We believe this unique approach will minimise piracy and disappointments for our customers as they will be watching the movie in full quality not some reduced pirated copy.”
The teaser for the film has already been released and the production team is now looking for sponsors to support the launch in August.
“We have just released the teaser for the film and we are now working towards the premier of the movie in August so we are looking for sponsors especially those who have the girl child at heart, to make it possible. We have another production that we are also working on that we are looking to release about the same time as ‘Mwanasikana 2’ called ‘Tariro: The Voice Within’, which is also a girl child story with a very powerful storyline.”
