From Rebecca Murray,
Your Guide to Hollywood Movies.
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Writer/director Gavin Hood picked up the 2006 Best Foreign Film Oscar for the hard-hitting dramatic film Tsotsi starring Percy Matsemela. Based on the novel by playwright Athol Fugard, Tsotsi follows a young thug ('tsotsi' in South African slang) who is forced to care for a child after he accidently kidnaps the youngster during a carjacking.

In support of the movie's release on DVD, filmmaker Hood talked about bringing the story to life on the big screen:

It Truly is a Small World: Hood’s been making the trip back and forth between Los Angeles and Johannesburg, South Africa, for the last 15 years. Some might wonder how he adjusts to the differences between the two cities, but Hood said it’s not as difficult as you might believe. “I’m going to say something surprising but a lot of people think that LA and Johannesburg for example are so different and they’re really not. They’re actually more similar than for example London and Johannesburg in the sense that they’re sort of big, sprawling [cities] and there are issues in LA. You go down to South Central LA, there are issues of poverty… This particular story deals with that world.

One of the frustrations about coming from a country where we’re not making that many films is that you feel sort of a pressure that the films you make tell the audience everything about your country. Of course that’s impossible. Whereas you guys in the States make so many films that if you make a film set in a tough neighborhood, you can make that film and then somebody else will be making a film set in Manhattan. Because Americans make so many films, it’s through watching a lot of films that the international world gets a picture of the States in all its complexities. I hope that as the South African industry grows, we’ll see more and more films about all sorts of different aspects of South Africa and a broader picture will emerge.”

The End of Apartheid and Stories Left to Tell: “One of the tragedies of the whole Apartheid era was this mentality that sort of said a) under the Apartheid regime you had to be very careful about what you said because of censorship,” explained Hood. “There was a real ‘no’ mentality about what you could say. And now that Apartheid is gone, even though that censorship has been lifted, I think South Africans still struggle to [figure out] what stories we permitted to tell, as though permission were required - which it isn’t.”

One of the struggles is for a long time people thought we can only tell stories that are about Apartheid or we can only tell stories that are about race. There’s so much more. There are so many things going on in people’s everyday lives. There are love stories that should be told, or thrillers that should be told.”

Hood continued: “One of the things we tried to do in Tsotsi is that it’s really a story about people that I hope transcends race and even time, in the sense that I think you could set Tsotsi as a story in many, many cities in the world. You could set it in South Central LA. You would modify its backstory, or where I spent time when I was with the Chicago International Film Festival and I was asked to talk at a lot of the Chicago inner city schools, for me that was a huge shock. I had no idea the levels of poverty and struggle in those inner city areas of Chicago. For that matter, you could set it in Moscow and make the cast all white or go to Shanghai and make the cast all Chinese, or go to Mexico and let it be an entirely Mexican cast. It’s essentially a story of a young person struggling to find the identity without parental and social support systems. I hope that that makes the film, gives it a timeless and universal quality. I think that’s what appeals to me about the movie was being able to combine this timeless and universal tale with a very specific setting so you get a real flavor.”

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