Tsotsi's Gavin Hood

Tsotsi director Gavin Hood spoke to the audience at the Angelika Film Center in downtown Houston the Monday preceding the Academy Awards. His Q&A was filled with both technical details and the more human story behind the making of the movie. When Tsotsi won the AA for Best Foreign Film the following weekend viewers saw Hood’s charismatic speaking style give grace and humor to his speech.
As Hood ordered the ceremony cameras to switch from him to the row with the actors from Tsotsi, he interspersed his acknowledgements with the cues from the teleprompter indicated the ticking clock. His commanding oratory skills aside it’s no surprise to learn that Hood has a law degree from his native country of South Africa and subsequently came to UCLA to study film. A producer approached Hood to helm Tsotsi based on Athol Fugard’s novel. Moving the story from the 50s to post-apartheid South Africa was one of Hood’s concerns.
Tsotsi, the title character, brutally shots a woman as he carjacks her luxury car. In the back seat is an infant. Discovering the baby in the car that he has since wrecked, Tsotsi decides to care for the child. A wide range of characters reflecting many of South Africa’s 11 official languages balances the film’s gritty realism as seen through street gangs and poverty.
“At the crucial point of the movie, the man who has been speaking high-Tswana starts talking to Tsotsi in street-Tswana,” Hood noted to the audience. Some of the other languages heard in Tsotsi include Afrikaans, English, Zulu and Dutch
Hood then demonstrated, walking back and forth in front of the screen, how he used stationary set-ups that kept “the eyeline tight to the lens.” Using his hands to draw imaginary borders on the screen Hood demonstrated how he cropped the image for any subsequent television projection while in the digital intermediate stage of post-production.
Admittedly the best way to see a film is with the director explaining his movie commentary-style. A film like Tsotsi is loaded with so many fascinating peripheral aspects and they only become apparent when you’re familiar with the culture in which it takes place.