In the last week of October, a South African film crew from Cape Town will land in Mumbai to shoot the final schedule of Hansie, the movie, which is being produced by the former South African cricket captain’s elder brother, Frans Cronje.

“We will be there for a week at the end of October and the first few days of November. We will shoot some of the cricket action, Hansie’s first visit to Mother Teresa (it happened for real in Kolkata in the early 1990s), the bookies making contact with Hansie, and his struggles to get rid of them,” Frans reveals in an email to The Indian Express.

No, Mohammed Azharuddin will not figure in the $8-million movie, nor will Mukesh Gupta — Hansie had told match-fixing investigators after the scandal in 2001 that the former Indian captain had introduced him to Gupta, a leading bookie at that time.

“We have used actors for the entire movie and no cricketers play themselves. We will use fictional names for the bookies. We will use Indian actors, but are still waiting to confirm them,” writes Frans, who heads Global Creative Studios, an award-winning production house in Cape Town.

Francois Rautenbach, a South African actor, will play Hansie and Sarah Thompson, a TV star from the US, will play the vital role of wife Bertha, who is now remarried.

Based on the 2005 biography The Hansie Cronje Story: An Authorised Biography, the movie will not explore the match-fixing case in detail, but will focus on “Hansie’s inner journey” in a three-part narrative — rise, fall and acceptance. And that’s probably why the first shot that was canned near Cape Town on August 27 showed “a Xhosa woman running across to road to give Hansie a hug and tell him that the people still love him, even though he had made a mistake.”

Frans and his director Regardt van den Bergh hope to wrap up shooting on November 3, with the Mumbai leg, and want the movie ready for commercial release, including a possible opening in India, in September, 2008.

“It has been a great privilege to be involved. There were a few scenes that were emotional to film, like for instance the King Commission (that probed the match-fixing scandal) and Peter Pollock (father of South Africa pacer Shaun Pollock) giving Hansie counsel in the years where he rebuilt his life after being banned from cricket,” writes Frans. Last November, Frans’s movie Faith Like Potatoes won the People’s Choice Award at the Sabaoth Film Festival in Milan. He had told this newspaper then: “Our movies are all inspirational stories of people who aspired to make a difference. I wouldn’t say that Hansie influenced my film career, but in growing up together, we mutually influenced each other.”