Gripping story of apartheid survivor

A rags-to-riches story, it has an irresistible appeal: boy from bloodstained black townships triumphs over horror childhood to sit among the stars.

The trouble is - and despite the best efforts of the foreign press to squeeze it into shape - the story won't quite fit in that box. The last bit is true: Presley Chweneyagae was at the ceremony when Tsotsi, the film in which he has the title role, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But he doesn't relate to the bit about a horror childhood in a bloodstained township.

He grew up in a township all right, in the North West Province, on the fringes of the city of Mafikeng. But he was the child of a solo mother who worked as a cop and encouraged him to do singing and acting classes rather than cruise the streets looking for trouble.

"The township was not like the one you see on screen," says Chweneyagae, down a scratchy phone line from Pretoria. "We had brick houses and electricity and it was much more proper."

More proper, he means, than the township in Tsotsi, a potent and polished drama. Chweneyagae, 21, but barely 19 when the cameras were rolling, plays a young, unscrupulous hoodlum so divorced from his past that he goes by the name "Tsotsi", which means "thug" in the language of the ghetto. And the township where the film is set, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, is a hellish place of corrugated iron shacks, open drains and casual murder, where Tsotsi rules with a psychopathic ruthlessness.

One night he carjacks a BMW and discovers, to his horror, a baby in the back seat. And, as he deals with this unexpected obstacle, Tsotsi morphs from a township Mean Streets into a touching, if intentionally ambiguous, story of redemption.

It's a belter of a movie, the more astonishing because it's a screen debut for the young Chweneyagae. But this is a young man who doesn't believe in starting small. Before he left high school he'd played Puck and King Lear (he's a big Shakespeare fan) in community theatre. An agent spotted him on the stage of the South African State Theatre, playing Hamlet, if you please, at the age of 18.

"That was my first professional stage play," he says, "but I was still at high school and [the agent] told me to finish my schooling first and then come and see her."

So he did. The agent got him the break to chance for a minor part in Tsotsi, but he asked to read for the lead.

"There was something about the role," he says, mildly, "that was clicking for me."

Chweneyagae does not ooze the sense of a man who was once a street thug: he is softly spoken and has a disarming tendency to address his interviewers as "sir" and "ma'am". And while he says he saw some daylight knifings as a kid, he wasn't one to carry a knife.

"What interested me about this story was the thought that I could make people feel, make them hate me and then love me again. If I could do that, it would be an achievement."

Tsotsi is the freshest example from a South African film industry - of a South Africa - that is coming of age in the post-apartheid era. It's now 16 years since Nelson Mandela was freed; 12 years since the first multi-racial elections.

Chweneyagae never knew the apartheid era. "I know that Mandela was in prison and that there were riots [in Soweto] in 1976 and so on. I know a lot of stuff but I've never really been a victim of apartheid."

The subtexts of race and power that an outside viewer might read in a story set in the townships didn't ring bells with the film-makers. Tsotsi takes place in a sealed world, devoid of political context. The single white character, a cop, speaks fluent Xhosa and "even though he's white, he plays black", Chweneyagae says.

The young actor sees Tsotsi (like Yesterday, the touching film of a black woman diagnosed as HIV-positive, which was Oscar-nominated last year) as "a classical tragedy of redemption, which could have been set anywhere. We looked at the film as a universal story."

Tsotsi is based on the only novel by famed South African playwright Athol Fugard, an Afrikaaner who constantly challenged the regime - he lost his passport for four years - with coruscating and provocative plays like Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena.

Tsotsi, hand-written on scrap paper in the 1960s, discovered in the 70s and published in 1980, is a remarkable novel, full of prose both spare and dense: "The street they took was crooked and buckled and Tsotsi led them a way that was sharp with stones, and eyes, and dogs' teeth."

But the screenplay, by director Gavin Hood, reinvents the story. In the original, a newly repressive government was clearing a poor mixed-race neighbourhood for a whites-only suburb. In the end, Tsotsi dies - literally crushed by the machinery of the state - when a wall collapses on him.

Hood, by contrast, sets the film in a modern South Africa, in the hope that the universal themes "would resonate more powerfully" if the story were contemporary rather than historical.

It's a decision Fugard applauds. He described the first-draft script as "totally faithful to the spirit of the book" and the finished film as "everything in my wildest dreams I hoped it would be; a film of great beauty and integrity [which] will rank as one of the best films ever to come out of South Africa."

Tsotsi's box office take near the end of its US and British runs is less than US$5 million ($8 million), although it was slightly boosted by the Oscar win. But the Oscar success is significant. It is the first film from the African continent to win an Academy Award, although South Africans - actress Charlize Theron, writer Ronald Harwood and cinematographer Dion Beebe - have carried the flag for the Rainbow Nation in the past.

Hood told the Seattle Times that the South African film business was two industries: one serving large international productions, lured by government-funded production incentives and served by great crews and technical infrastructure; and the other a local film industry which was "maybe better called the local storytelling industry".

He might have been speaking of New Zealand, particularly when he added that fragility of the local industry put pressure on film-makers: "You feel that if you don't make a good film, you're setting everyone back. We're not that big, there's not much room for error."

Hood had developed an affinity with the inhabitants of Soweto and other townships while making documentaries about HIV/Aids, but he had to overcome politicians' outrage when Tsotsi was presented as South Africa's entry for the Academy Awards. One politician felt it didn't paint a good picture of the country. Others accused him of being a propagandist. But he was vindicated by the Oscar victory.

"We may have foreign language films, but our stories are the same as your stories," he said, his voice cracking with emotion, when he picked up the statuette. "They are about the human heart and emotions."

Chweneyagae says the Oscar will get "more South Africans, aspiring actors, aspiring film-makers, believing in themselves, because they see that it is possible to win an Oscar telling a South African story. And that will attract more investors."

That being so, it's easy to understand why Chweneyagae is puzzled by questions about the film-maker's ethnicity.

"We get asked that a lot," he says. "Gavin gets asked why he decided to do a 'black' movie and I get asked how I feel about a white man directing it.But that's not really the way we think about it. I just wanted to make a movie about people. And that's what we did."

* Tsotsi opens on June 1 at Rialto cinemas.