Tongai Furusa the making of a successful film editor and businessman
By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor
He maintains that his inspiration to start a business in the film industry is his mother, who he says has always been in business, and so has been his father.
However, after completing his studies at AFDA, he took on a job as a film editor for a production company, where he perfected his editing skills. These became handy later life, making him one of the much sought after film editor in the country working with leading filmmakers as well as creating award winning music videos for some of the big names in the sector.
’And so, although I have been asked to speak about mentorship and its role in business, I am not quite sure whether one needs a mentor of or not.” Well, he was in fact joking. In fact, the late of mentorship, formally or in formally meant that his journey to the tip became longer.
Tongai was the featured guest at last week, Friday, July 25, 2025 at the Creative Mornings discussion in Rosebank, where he unpacked the value of having a mentor.
For example, in his journey to becoming a successful businessman and highly sought after editor, with an impressive portfolio of clients, he made mistakes that he could have easily avoided had he had mentors around him, who would advise him on matters of business.
“For example, while I was working full time for a production company as an editor, I bought editing equipment, in fact a powerful machine I had seen a friend of mine use at another company where he worked in film post production. From there a friend of mine with whom I shared a house in Melville, started editing other people’s work, such as music videos. We were actually busy with well-known names in the music industry coming to us. But then someone told me eventually that if I wanted to really make it big, I needed to move out of the house and rent offices as I would need to meet CEOs in my office not in the bed room, which I did at 44 Stanely,” he told the audience.
He worked with big names in the sector from there onwards, a far cry from the time when was working in his bedroom.
“The truth is I assisted big names in the bedroom when they would just come in and I would work on their products, editing during my spare time with people such as Khalo Matabane, Dumisani Phakhati for example, having engaged my services. But I needed to grow my business out of the bedroom, and I did so eventually when I resigned where I was working and took my business seriously.
Indeed today he has worked with several clients including Nandos, shooting and editing. But he has learned that he cannot do everything, and instead today his company 10 Fourteen in reference to the house number in Melville where it started is a sleek operation with several collaborators and working with him.
“At the beginning, my attitude was that I was young, black and ready to take on the world. I did not have a mentor even as I delivered 40 episodes of pure Monate working with the likes of Kagiso Lediga. Business was good, as it was at a time when the SABC and the national film and video foundation put a lot of money into the local film industry,” he explained.
But the filmmaker says there came a time when he did not know what he was. Was he an editor of a businessman.
It is then that he started learning from other people who were already in the business. ”I then employed an administrator to deal with things such as invoices while I focus on editing and not being all over the place,” he said.