Lights, camera, action! - Meet Kuda Jemba, the emerging film director who went from directing music videos for some of SA’s biggest stars to directing Kelly Khumalo’s upcoming reality show
About 50 members of the media, label personnel, friends and family are gathered at the Universal Music live space for a dinner to celebrate Kelly Khumalo’s recent gold and platinum certifications for her album, The Voice of Africa.
“He responded on WhatsApp and said, ‘There’s some good shit here’ and from that moment I knew I had one foot in the door.” “A relatively inexperienced director with an experienced crew. To me that sounded like a recipe for disaster, but deep down I knew I wasn’t going to talk myself out of a room I had worked hard to be in. I had done my homework on reality shows and consulted with my peers in the industry.
“I was meant to watch an animation but never made it to that cinema because I saw the poster for The Fast and the Furious. Walking into that cinema a couple of minutes late and seeing that green Mitsubishi Eclipse make its entrance into the underground race world, with green lights underneath the car and tons of cars and women, I was like, ‘Yo, this is super cool. I want to do cool stuff like this and drive souped-up cars like that one day.
Fast forward two years. MJ gave Jemba a call asking him to help with the next film MJ would be directing, one he would later go on to sell to Mzansi Magic. A few months later, Jemba was fired from his office job. “That was one of the best blessings for me. I thought to myself, I can either go home, cry myself to sleep and wake up the next morning and apply for another job. Or I can choose to see the good in this situation and pursue [it] full time. I did the latter.”