“Imali” revisits the beauty of storytelling in music video
There’s something to be said for newcomer director Keith Benza’s ability to tame the egos of some of South Africa’s top actors and so convincingly get them to operate at their highest level for a music video. Big time actors are often reluctant to do music videos – they find them to be below their art form.
So when I saw the cast of A-List actors from Showmax’s The Wife in Zakes Bantwini and Karyendasoul’s music video for their hit single, “iMali” which they premiered late April in front of a gathering of media, public figures and other shareholders at The Houghton Hotel’s The Venue, I was curious as to how they would fare in young director Keith Benza’s first major video as a director.
You wouldn’t tell that Keith is still finding his feet with how expertly curated the music video is. “The concept of the overall video was we knew we wanted to have an element of a skit of some sort,” Keith said when we spoke over the phone a few days ago. “And mainly that was to give a sense of where this money was coming from because we had a sponsor and we wanted to incorporate it in the storyline.”
When I asked him what the thinking was behind the green “money people” in the video, Keith explained: “An element I wanted to include was representation, cause I’m big on representation. I wanted those green guys that you see to represent money and the power of money. And the scenes where they show that money can pamper you, like you see scenes where Nana is getting fanned by them.
Money can really put you in a comfortable space where even on a hot day you don’t feel hot. And that’s just a light example of the metaphor, it extends further than that.” Keith, who is responsible for all of Zakes Bantwini’s social media content, has had his hands full over the past few months with Zakes’ heavy schedule.
“There’s a lot of gigs and a whole lot of content that needs to go out. We’re doing events as well that we’re hosting in-house. I’m even at a point where I’m trying to put together a team that’s just solely working with us. But more than anything it’s been fun and tough at the same time. It’s been rewarding in terms of seeing your work being seen by a whole lot of other people.”
When Keith and Zakes met up and decided to work together long term, the whole chat was Keith would take on everything visual. Eventually, after he spent a lot of time doing short form content, they started seeing how well iMali was doing and felt compelled to put out a video. Zakes kept his word and enlisted him as the director.
“Them trusting me with such a big budget felt like a big challenge because I didn’t want to disappoint at the same time. But I still took my step to make my visual direction still come through because I know if you have something like this to someone else, they would’ve tried to satisfy mainly Zakes and just the people in the country in terms of how we go about shooting music videos. So I stuck on my direction and my own visual style.”
