March 16, 2006

By CHITRA RAMASWAMY
Street News Service

Gavin Hood is a white South African who’s made a film about Black South Africans — and he’s not about to apologize for it. “Was Ang Lee gay when he made Brokeback Mountain?” he asks. “Was Spike Lee Irish when he made 25th Hour?” The director of Oscar-winning Tsotsi is evidently sick of this question.

Set in the sprawling slum of Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Tsotsi tells the story of the violent and troubled titular gangster (tsotsi literally translates as “thug” in tsotsi-taal, the township patois). During six days his life is torn apart when, after a brutal fight, he runs to a nearby affluent neighbourhood and shoots a woman during a car-jacking. It’s only when he drives off that he hears the screams of her baby in the back seat. The tale, adapted from a novel by South African Athol Fugard, follows Tsotsi as he is forced to care for the infant and decide whether to return it.

It’s not easy viewing. Tsotsi and his gang brutally murder a man with an ice pick on a packed commuter train for no reason; he forces a young woman in the shantytown to breastfeed the baby at gunpoint; and we see the next generation of tsotsis, orphaned children below the age of 10, living in stacked-up industrial pipes. This is South Africa after apartheid, where rich and poor live side by side, forever reminding one another of the gulf that stretches out between them.

But Hood is reluctant to describe Tsotsi in purely post-apartheid terms. “It’s in no way fully representative of what’s happening in the country,” he says. “We’re not a travel brochure. But Tsotsi is set in a particular place, with its poverty, HIV, and its discrepancy — which is too wide — between the haves and have-nots. You could set this movie in the tough areas of Glasgow or Buenos Aires or South Central L.A. That’s why I’m not really interested in it being about race. It’s about a kid from a tough area who’s trying to find his identity.”

But in many ways Tsotsi can’t help but be a film about the new South Africa. Tsotsis are the children of apartheid, of a system of segregation that forced poor Black people to live by night on the city’s fringes and turn to crime. No education, no work, and no pass to get into “white zones” raised a generation of angry and isolated tsotsis.

“ Every one of us in South Africa has perpetrated crime, been a victim of crime, or both,” says Hood. “My mother’s been carjacked twice and I’ve been mugged — so it gives you access to who these kids are and why.”

It’s the film’s power to generate debate, says Hood, that gives Tsotsi its hope. “What we have now is a country with a great constitution. That’s why in the book [set in the 1950s] Tsotsi dies and in the movie he doesn’t — but it’s up to you to decide what ought to happen to him.

“ One of the legacies of apartheid was to frighten people away from saying what they were thinking. Now that we can say what we like, it’s an odd freedom,” he continues. “We’re not quite sure what stories to tell. Do they have to be caught up in the political? Can they be broad comedy?”

But Tsotsi is a story that Hood wanted to tell ever since the book was published in 1980. He tried to get the rights for it, couldn’t, and ended up working on other projects, including two feature films and a spell working for the government making educational programs about AIDS. Then, in 2003, producer Peter Fudakowskyi phoned Hood and asked him to write the script and direct the film.

Hood wanted the story shifted from the ’50s to the modern day. He also wanted to shoot it on location in Johannesburg, in tsotsi-taal, and use the best actors for the roles, which he felt would be unknowns. Fudakowskyi wanted Hollywood names. “South African filmmakers have got to be realistic: we’ve got to sell films abroad,” explains Hood.

Hood got his way, and they went local, visiting community theater groups in the townships. He and the cast translated the script from English into tsotsi-taal. And he set it to a thumping, brash soundtrack of kwaito — African hip-hop — by South African star Zola, who also makes an appearance in the film.

Being an outsider looking in made for a better film. “You come at it with less baggage,” he says. But he asks one thing of his audience: “Please don’t force me to make movies about middle-aged white South African men for the rest of my life.”

Tsotsi will be released on DVD soon. Athol Fugard’s novel has been reissued by Canongate and is out now. n

Reprinted from Big Issue-Scotland. ©Street News Service: www.street-papers.org.