Oscar glory for South Africa
2006-03-06 09:28
Los Angeles - Tsotsi, the South African film about a Johannesburg township thug, won the Oscar for best foreign language film on Sunday, making it the first film from the country to win the award.
Directed and written by South African Gavin Hood, 42, the film features a searing performance by Presley Chweneyagae as a gun-toting, emotionally dead gangster who suddenly learns that human life has some value when he is forced to care for a baby he has kidnapped.
"Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica, God bless Africa!" Hood said, upon receiving his award. "We may have foreign language films, but our stories are the same as your stories. They are about the human heart and emotion."
Backstage, he could barely contain his glee.
"I feel damn great, I feel truly overjoyed. It doesn't get any better than this. This is the Olympics of filmmaking and I am so proud of everyone in South Africa who worked on this film," he said, "Let me tell you now, no kidding, it's four or five in the morning at home and I know they are going crazy."
The film was based on famed playwright Athol Fugard's only novel, a 1950s tale about the dehumanising effects apartheid was having on the lives of black South Africans.
Updated story to the present
With Fugard's permission, Hood updated the story to the present day and made its main character a grown-up Aids orphan.
Hood has said the changes allowed him to present the despair of post-apartheid South Africa as well as the violence that lurks beneath the surface. But Hood also insisted that his aim was to tell a universal morality tale.
"Storytelling is important to people," he said backstage. "It's not just about learning about other people, it's also how we learn about ourselves and I hope we will do it more and more and also reveal our common humanity to the rest of the world."
Hood said being the first South African film to win an Oscar "tells me and all of us at home that we can do it."
"What we want like everybody else is just to tell our stories," he said. "This hopefully encourages more South African filmmakers to just keep telling their stories."
The other nominated films were the Italian family drama Don't Tell, the French war story Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas), the German World War Two film Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, and the Palestinian film Paradise Now.