AFTER finishing film school in the summer of 1997, Dumi Gumbi left Boston, Massachusetts, where had lived since he was 13, to check out the scene in Los Angeles. "I wanted to work in Hollywood," he says with a tinge of nostalgia in his eyes. "The great thing about the US is that the big life you see in films is the same as west Hollywood ... it’s surreal in a way."Not being a US citizen made his dream impossible, so Gumbi headed back to SA to begin the journey towards becoming a film producer. Settling briefly in Durban, the place of his birth, Gumbi says fitting back into South African life was difficult at first. "The film and television industry wasn’t yet a developed sector," which made getting work difficult.Gumbi has come a long way since, and his latest film, Die Spook van Uniondale, a quirky Tim Burton-like adaptation of an urban legend of a ghost that haunts an isolated Karoo town, opens in cinemas at the end of the month.Getting to this point hasn’t always been plain saili...
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