'Tsotsi appeals to our humanity'
2006-02-06 09:14
Johannesburg - South African film sensation Tsotsi is winning acclaim with its raw and compassionate depiction of Johannesburg's criminal underworld, where poverty and HIV/Aids are mainstays of existence.
Beautifully shot in the sprawling township of Soweto, the film tells the story of a 19-year-old "tsotsi", or thug, who is confronted with the depravity of his life while caring for a baby found in the back seat of a car he hijacked after shooting the mother.
Following on the award-winning Yesterday about HIV/Aids and Carmen in Khayelitsha set in a Cape Town squatter camp, Tsotsi is the latest coup from a film industry that has boldly focused on South Africa's modern-day problems.
"We are finding our voice," said Paul Raleigh, one of the co-producers of Tsotsi, which has been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film and is the first South African movie to be nominated for a British Bafta award.
"There is something about this film that appeals to our humanity," he said.
Storyline
Set to kwaito music, the pumping sound of South Africa's urban youth, Tsotsi opens with the teenage gangster leading his posse to a train station to prey on passengers.
The victim turns out to be an older gentleman who is mercilessly - and quietly - stabbed on a packed commuter train as a small envelope of cash is pulled from the inner pocket of his suit jacket.
"We didn't want to glamourise crime. We didn't want to sensationalise it. But we needed to show that the character of Tsotsi was dangerous, that he is capable of killing," said Raleigh.
"But because of his age, there is a vulnerability and when you start chipping away at his armour, you see him break down."
In the train station, Tsotsi meets a wheelchair-bound vagrant who turned to begging after losing his job in a mine.
"Why do you go on when you live like a dog?", Tsotsi asks the old man.
"I like to feel the sun on the street?" he replies.
The film revolves around Tsotsi's wrenching decision to return the baby to his parents, doing "the right thing" perhaps for the first time in his young hard life.
Story about hope, forgiveness
After forcing a young mother to breastfeed the baby at gunpoint, Tsotsi watches her bathe the infant and finally agrees when she pleads with him to leave the baby with her, only to return with tins of formula milk.
"Just because you have milk doesn't make you his mother," says the young woman who tries to persuade him to give the baby back.
"It's a story about hope, it's a story about forgiveness, and it also deals with the issues that we are facing as South Africans: HIV/Aids, poverty and crime," said Presley Chweneyagae, the 21-year old actor who plays Tsotsi.
"But at the same time, it could take place anywhere in the world," said Chweneyagae, who is making his film debut after briefly working in community theatre in his home township near Mafikeng in nothern South Africa.
Tsotsi has picked up five awards at film festivals in Edinburgh, Thessaloniki, Los Angeles and Toronto and was also nominated for a Golden Globe award as best foreign film.