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Multi-award-winning actor and TV personality Lawrence Maleka has just touched down at OR Tambo after a trip to Toronto, Canada where his film Future Tense had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this week.
Not only is this his debut as an executive producer, but Future Tense is also his first science fiction experience.
Unpacking Future Tense
Set in a future Cape Town, the film is plotted around colonial history, climate change and the human emotion of guilt.
The Mother City is on the brink of severe environmental and climate collapse, and in true “rich getting richer, poor getting poorer” fashion, the elite have the option to escape to cleaner and safer eras of the past.
Lawrence describes his character, Lwando, as a very conflicted man. He has bottled up a lot of the emotions that he struggles to articulate, but life does not stop to accommodate his internal turmoil, so there’s a mission at hand.
He and his partner win an excursion that sees them travelling back to 1647 – centuries before the world became industrialised.
In Lawrence’s words, at the heart of Lwando’s journey is a very difficult choice: does he choose love or does he try to save a people? That conflict drives a lot of what he experiences throughout the film.
Lawrence Maleka’s elevation from actor to executive producer
Audiences know and love Lawrence for his comedy in The Lobola Man, dramatic performances in The River and other productions, but in Future Tense he launches himself as an executive producer.
He says when one is backed by the right people and has sufficient time to learn and understand the process, any transition becomes less intimidating.
“I’m incredibly grateful that I got to take this step with such an amazing group of people. Being involved both in front of and behind the camera gave me a much broader appreciation for everything that goes into bringing a film to life,” he says.
While science fiction is new territory for the actor, he says he’s always excited about the characters and scripts that he has the opportunity to work with, and Future Tense was no different.
It’s never about the genre for the actor as he shares that the goal is always to make the character and the world in which they exist believable.
“Stepping into sci-fi was exciting because it gave me the opportunity to explore a different kind of story while still grounding the character in something very human and real,” he explains.
While nothing has been confirmed yet, Lawrence is already in conversation with one of the film festivals here at home as he is eager to share Future Tense with his own people.
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