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Acclaimed film maker Akin Omotoso this week started shooting his latest movie, Vaya. It’s a far cry from his last one, Tell Me Sweet Something, a romantic comedy that is proving a runaway hit at the box office.
The only thing Vaya has in common with Sweet Something is that they both play out on the streets of Joburg.
“Vaya tells a story of three strangers [two guys and a girl] from Durban who board a train to Joburg. The three never meet but their stories intersect and one event links them all,” he told City Press during an exclusive visit to the set in Jeppestown this week.
Omotoso was attached to the film fairly recently, but its team of seven writers and researchers – including Omotoso’s business partner Robbie Thorpe, Madoda Ntuli and Zibo Mafela – have been developing Vaya for the past six years.
Vaya grew out of a homeless writers project, which in turn grew out of work on the TV series A Place Called Home, penned by homeless and formerly homeless people.
The film, which stars several newcomers and several big names – Mary Twala, Sihle Xaba, Warren Masemola – marks a return to Omotoso’s project to deliver social-justice messages through cinema. He established his directorial reputation with the xenophobia thriller Man On Ground.
“People want good stories. There is a market for escapism and there is a market for social realism ... [Vaya] is gritty, it’s set on the streets, it’s about the lives of those invisible people, but it is also an exciting story. We think how these characters and their lives intersect is exciting.”
“I was living on the street when we wrote this film,” said Ntuli, one of the writers on set, this week. “The story is about us coming from outside Johannesburg to the big city with big dreams, and when you get here, things don’t work the way you thought.”
Filming in Soweto and downtown Joburg will wrap up in January next year and Vaya will most likely be released late in 2016.
