TSOTSI

Director: Gavin Hood
Cast: Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto, Kenneth Nkosi, Mothusi Magano, Zenzo Ngqobe
Run Time: 94 minutes
Country: United Kingdom/South Africa
Language: Tsotsi-taal with English subtitles
Rating: 14A (Violence, coarse language)

"Hood's film, with its bold, beautiful cinematography and hard-thumping kwaito music, brings us into a different world, and then helps us to understand it." - Premiere

An audience award winner at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival® and an Academy Award® nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, TSOTSI is a riveting and important film about the legacy of deprivation and violence in South Africa.

Adapted from a novel by the eminent South African playwright Athol Fugard and set in the gritty, hair-trigger environment of the Johannesburg ghettos, the film is relentless in its portrayal of one man’s battle with his own brutal nature and the past that bred it.

One night, after winning a bloody bar fight, Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) comes upon an opportunity for a spontaneous carjacking. After discovering a small infant in the car, he abandons the vehicle and the baby. Moments later, compelled to return, he scoops the baby into a shopping bag and hustles through the darkness to his ramshackle home in the townships. Realizing he has neither the skills nor the temperament to care for a child, Tsotsi zeroes in on Miriam (Terry Pheto), a young mother in his neighbourhood, and forces her at gunpoint to care for “his” baby.

Tsotsi’s uneasy, negotiated relationship with Miriam provokes a volcanic chain of events that only results in further confrontation. Utterly believable as a powder keg of potential violence that conceals an aching, childlike core, Chweneyagae displays extraordinary charisma and power.

Ably guided by Hood and surrounded by the raw energy of South African Kwaito music, Tsotsi and Miriam become symbols of the struggle towards dignity and away from poverty, violence and a cold, hard world.

"Tsotsi emerges as being among the finest films ever to come out of Africa. It is a brilliant, jolting and altogether powerful blast of energy and emotion." - Film Threat