With Mpumalanga settled upon, Nyakane relocated from Cape Town back to Mpumalanga to begin preparations several months before the shoot was due to begin. While he began scouting for locations, he also faced the difficulties of casting – in particular the youngsters that play in the flashbacks of the adult actors’ childhood, where thirty percent of the film is set. “I was thinking, ‘How am I going to cast this? There were thoughts that we’d have to go all over local schools and cast a classroom.” But, something about this notion didn’t sit right with him. He decided it would be much better to cast real kids from the rural areas the story was set.

“In the end, we resolved to shoot in Oakley in the Bushbuckridge villages,’ Nyakane notes. “We were far away from the city – and these were country children. So, these children would wake up in the morning, do house chores, then walk five or six kilometres to school – and turn up for filming over the weekend.”

As well as working behind the scene as director, Derry Cage Nyakane (Calvin) continues to play challenging and exciting roles in front of the camera. Mpumalanga-born Derry graduated from City Varsity – school of media and creative arts with a diploma in film and television production techniques. He briefly went on to train at AFDA – South African school of motion picture medium and live performance and had his first academic acting. He then turned his attentions to acting and until LOGIC OF DREAMS had only played in short films. ‘LOGIC OF DREAMS’ is Derry’s first feature film.

The Children – the majority rest of the cast was made up of locals and the children who actually live in the rural areas that were used as locations for the film. Nyakane still faced one major headache: how to integrate the adult actors into the lives of real kids who had never seen a film camera, let alone acted before. ”I knew we wouldn’t be able to find younger versions of the older cast,” says Nyakane. While he had already accumulated experience working with “real kids” from his childhood when he was also an amateur filmmaker, he’d never pulled off anything like this. Initially, long before filming began, he decided the best approach was just to bond with the kids and let each other’s traits rub off on the other. “I just drove around, and let the children have a good time, and just observed what they were like.”

“And I got to know the children, got to know them properly – and then guided them towards those different characters that we were going to do. Then the Canon 5D camera was introduced and the children weren’t intimidated. Unless they caught me doing a playback in the viewfinder, they just didn’t know. You had to give them something to play or do that was more interesting than the camera.” Even so, while the children didn’t prove camera-shy, the question of how to get them to act in English was another matter. In the end, Nyakane resolved to let them act in SiSwati and Xitsonga languages.

For Nyakane, he hopes the experience his young cast had in participating on LOGIC OF DREAMS was just as enriching for them.