Film Director Laments The Difficulty Of Obtaining Music By Mzansi Superstars.
Soon Comes Night is a six-part crime thriller produced by Ochre Moving Pictures that follows the narrative of freedom fighter turned theft mastermind Alex Shabane. The series is set in the 1990s, but the main character experiences flashbacks of his time in the 1980s.
According to Moleya, it became difficult to obtain music at that period.
The other icons, like Brenda Fassie, it’s so hard to release her music because her music rights are in the States [USA], and they sit with different people, Moleya stated in an interview with Newzroom Afrika.
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Even songs by Miriam Makeba, we can’t access those songs because black artists at that time were exploited and their music sits with people we can’t get a hold of, someone who is sitting in London who doesn’t care and then gives you an invoice and says ‘well, if you want to use Brenda’s songs, Miraim’s songs, you have to pay X amount.
There’s a bigger conversation around our past icons and how they actually have to get their music rights back, they need to belong to their families, said the film’s director.
Moleya, who also directed the telenovela Gomora, discussed the difficulties in depicting the series’ time period, particularly on a restricted budget.
As directors and creatives, we had to think about how we might maximise while remaining faithful to the time period. So that anyone viewing from those times would say, ‘yeah, those are the cars we drove…yes, those are the clothes we wore and the music we listened to.
He described the difference between how the township looks now and how it looked in the 1980s and 1990s as a problem.
A lot of our shots took place in Soweto. As a director, I couldn’t fathom shooting for the 80s and 90s; I was really constrained in how wide I could shoot the township since it had satellites everywhere, which we didn’t have [in the 80s and 90s].
Kwenzo Ngcobo, who plays Shabane in The Wife, is so absorbed in his portrayal of Shabane that he can’t remember parts of the sequences he filmed.
I don’t remember doing those scenes, which is very scary; I’m not sure what happened,
Ngcobo stated in the interview.
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