Kafui Danku, Mawuli Gavor and others go on location to shoot “The SMS”

“THE SMS”, the much talked about yet-to-be-produced movie which is set in Accra will start shooting from next week Saturday. The movie will be released as a trilogy, according to the producers MSI Productions, a Ghanaian film and television production company.

The cast for the movie is made up of a mix of veteran and young actors and actresses such as Kafui Danku, Mawuli Gavor, Psalm Adjetefio, Emmanuel Armah and Joseph Ofei. It will also feature new entrants such as Jessica Osei, Linda Zelu and Genevieve Gyapong.

“The SMS” is a suspense filled story written by Graphic Showbiz columnist and entertainment critic Francis Doku and the rights to the story was recently acquired by MSI Productions to develop into a screenplay and then a film.

The story is about a married man who wrongly sent an SMS intended to his mistress to his wife and the efforts he made within one day to retrieve the message from his wife’s phone and delete it before she sees it throws up a good dose of suspense, humour, conflict, jealousy and all the ingredients that make a good drama.

According to Francis Doku, he started writing “The SMS” some four years ago and shared with his friends on social network site Facebook. “I had wanted to write one short story and then it took on a life of its own and I managed to write four parts. Part four was written about three years ago until filmmaker Vincent Akiti saw them and decided to make it into a movie then I had only one month to complete the thirteen part series,” he said.

The director of MSI Productions who is also the director of the movie Vincent Akiti said he was surprised to have seen such a good story circulating on Facebook for so long a time without anyone making it into a movie or television serial.

He said “immediately I read the first part of the series on Francis’ page, I knew that this was something worth putting one’s money and time into. My only surprise was that, such a good story had been in the public domain for close to three years and no producer or any interested person, had tried to turn it into a television serial or a movie. I read the story, got in touch with Francis and sealed the deal for the rights in less than a month.”

“The main reason why I got interested in acquiring the rights for the story is that I saw it as a breath of fresh air. It is very different from most of the storylines that we have become used to in Ghana and Nigeria,” he added.

According to Akiti, his interest in the SMS is the beginning of scouting for good stories. “Though I have written a lot of stories for television (over 110 stories for 7 different TV shows) and have tonnes of stories to do, I have always made it a point that whenever I see a good story, I will make a go at it and see how it ends. For me, the missing link in the movie and TV industry is not the dearth of talented artistes, or lack of equipment, it is a lack of good and properly treated stories and decent investment in the industry by stakeholders.”

The shooting of “The SMS” is slated to start from Saturday, 19th July, 2014 with the first installment of the trilogy planned to be out by third week in September. “These are very tight timelines we have set for ourselves but we believe we can meet them and get this interesting story out for viewers to enjoy it,” the director said.

The screenplay for “The SMS” was written by Vincent Akiti who is not new in the Ghanaian film and television industry as he has written scripts for shows such as “Adults in Education”, “Dada Boat”, “Sun City”, “Taxi Driver” and “Abiba.”

Akiti has also produced and directed movies and television series with the last movie he produced being “Just The Last Fun” which starred John Dumelo, Roselyn Ngissah, and Papa Nii, among others.

Some members of the technical team for “The SMS” include Makafui Bedzra, Elikem Nkansa and Vincent Akiti as executive producers, Yaw Sefa Jnr. who has done camera work on productions such as “Run Baby Run,” “Just The Last fun,” “Home Sweet Home,” “Suncity,” as cameraman as well as Elike Clothing for costumes.