African film chooses hope over wrist-slitting despondency

JOHANNESBURG - Tired of African films that make audiences want to slit their wrists, the director of the continent's top Oscar contender has opted for a universal tale of triumph over AIDS, poverty and violence.

The South African-British film "Tsotsi," a raw but redemptive story about a Johannesburg gang leader, won the People's Choice award at the Toronto festival and is tipped for a foreign-language Oscar nomination.

While "Tsotsi" -- township slang for "gangster" -- addresses head-on the violence of post-apartheid South Africa, director Gavin Hood wanted to avoid the despondency that so often characterizes movies about the world's poorest continent.

"My parents have been car-jacked, I have been mugged, we all know what it is like," Hood told Reuters in an interview. "But do you write a story about the way it is, or the way it should, or could, or needs to be?

"If you write a story about how it is, then your audience leaves wanting to slit their wrists."

"Tsotsi" -- touted by film critics as Africa's answer to Brazil's award-winning "City of God" about gang warfare in the favelas of Rio -- traces five days in the life of an abandoned AIDS orphan who has resorted to ruthless violence.

After stealing a woman's BMW at gunpoint, lead character Tsotsi discovers a baby in the back seat and is faced with a choice that will change his life forever.

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

"Tsotsi" crowns a wave of acclaimed films made in or about Africa, such as Zulu-language "Yesterday" and "Hotel Rwanda," which both won Oscar nominations and Xhosa film "U-Carmen eKhayelitsha" which took top honors at the Berlin Festival.

A modern adaptation of the anti-apartheid play by Athol Fugard, "Tsotsi" is set in the notorious Johannesburg township of Soweto and is distinctively South African.

The film's dialogue is in township slang, a blend of South Africa's 11 official languages with nicknames thrown in for beer, cars, weapons and sexual positions, that has grown out of the country's huge black townships.

HIV/AIDS -- which affects one in nine adults in Africa's richest country -- is "the elephant in the room," says Hood, and crime dominates the plot, reflecting South Africa's reputation as one of the most crime-ridden places on earth.

The film examines the huge gap between rich and poor in a country where vast gated mansions sit alongside sprawling shanty towns, replacing the chasm between black and white 11 years after the end of apartheid.

"My feeling on a political level is that none of us in Johannesburg can live in isolation," said Hood. "We have to step outside beyond our gates and walls."

However, Hood aims to impart what few African films have done previously -- a universal message for a global audience more attuned to the romantic comedies of Hollywood than the squalor and suffering of urban Africa.

"This is a universal parable that grows out of the place in which it is set," said Hood. "I didn't want HIV and class to overshadow the movie. These issues are there...but I think people are connecting with the humanity.

"After all, with a different throw of the dice, you or I could be like Tsotsi."

- REUTERS