Tsotsi

Directed by Gavin Hood

(2006) - South Africa

As I started this movie, I realized that it was not only my first South African movie, but my first African movie. Africa is a rather large continent and has a vast number of cultures, yet in the US, you don’t hear much (or anything really) about any of the movies that are being made there, despite Nigeria having one of the largest recent production records in the world.

Tsotsi won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture back in 2006. Tsotsi, meaning thug in the street language of South Africa, is the nickname given to the protagonist. Tsotsi really lives up to that name… he’s the leader of a gang in one of Johannesburg’s shantytowns and is involved in some pretty serious violence for being so young; armed robbery, murder, and theft. Late at night, he attempts to steal a car from a wealthy family and does so successfully. He gets on the road, wrecks the car, and soon discovers that there is an infant in the back seat and has to decide what to do about the child.

Throughout this movie, Tsotsi and the other characters use a local street language, a blend of some of the almost one dozen national languages of South Africa. These local languages all became official after the end of Apartheid, showing that one language wasn't considered more important than another. Twenty years later, English has become the dominant language that is taught in schools, while the other languages are still used but to a lesser degree. This vast array of spoken language isn't just found in South Africa but all over the African continent. While there are one or two national languages in many countries, that doesn't guarantee that the general population is fluent in it, but they might speak something else entirely.

Now that I've gotten my first taste of African film, I'm curious to see how other movies deal with language. There are thousands of languages spoken in Africa and even more dialects within those languages... so how does a filmmaker choose which language to use in a movie? And if they only use one language or a mix of languages, does that limit the span of their potential audience? For someone watching a subtitled version of the movie, this might not make a difference, but I wonder if it does for someone watching without subtitles who is from the region where the film is made.