"Viva Africa!" Garvin Hood

HOLLYWOOD, 6 Mar 2006 (Donal Brown for News Digest) - When “Tsotsi” won the Oscar for best foreign-language film this week in Hollywood, South Africans took the victory as an occasion for national pride but also as a sign that a story from South Africa can have universal appeal.

In a story in Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), Benita van Eyssen reports that South African President Thabo Mbeki congratulated “Tsotsi” writer and director Gavin Hood and his cast and crew saying, “It [the film] bears testimony to the abundance of South African talent and symbolizes what South Africans can achieve when we work together towards a common objective.”

The film was a story of a cold, violent young thug or Tsotsi who struggled with what to do with a baby found in the backseat of a car he hijacked after shooting the child’s mother.

The Sunday Times (Johannesburg) reported that Hood said at the Oscars that he was accepting the award on behalf of all directors of foreign films. “We may have foreign language films, but our stories are the same as your stories. They are about the human heart and emotions,” he said.

The Sunday Times also quoted Presley Chweneyagae, the 21-year-old actor who played Tsotsi. “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: AIDS, poverty and crime. But at the same time, it could take place anywhere in the world.”

The film is based on playwright Athol Fugard’s only novel, a story from the 1950s about the ill effects of apartheid on black South Africans. Hood updated the story to the present and made the main character an AIDS orphan grown up.

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