Tsotsi
Film
Gavin Hood
This film is about a small time criminal teenager name David but he is often called Tsotsi. Tsotsi is a teenager without feelings, has lack of discipline and hardened by his tough life living in the slums of South Africa. Tsotsi then comes to a point where he hijacks a car in a rich neighbor-hood. However whilst driving, Tsosti finds that there is a baby at the back seat of the car so he then takes it back to slums where he lives in a shack. BUT this film; its a film in which South Africans to see and here themselves as real people and not as feeble caricatures gleaned from countless Hollywood movies.
A challenge a character faced in the film is Tsotsi. Tsotsi isn't a particularly sympathetic character, and he does a lot of things with and without his gang, in the first third of the film that makes you wonder why you're expected to care what happens to him. At least in Tsotsi's case, his lack of a moral pressure seems to have a lot to do with his upbringing and lack of strong parental figures when he was a young child growing up with parents that was or wasn't there for him. Tsotsi faces a flashback to the incident that made him run away from home and it makes things clearer for me because as a young kid for him in those days he had to suffer living with his father who was an alcoholic and his mother who was failing to live because of the disease she had been given. Also this all leads up to when he was carjacking, forcing him to make tough decisions for himself about whats right even if it means he'll be put in jail.
A theme that i enjoyed in the film was Poverty and Criminality and the Interrelationship between Tsotsi and life. This is because Tsotsi is pushed into a life of crime due to poverty and this inhibits Tsotsi from being a law abiding citizen because it makes him a brutal criminal instead but he knows that robbery in itself is misguided. Also criminality comes to mind where South Africa and in the film they have similarities where they abduct from other people and gets away with it, this helps me understand as an audience because living in a area that is minor gets them frustrated to get what they want and what they need in terms of money, food and water.
A message or one thing i learned after watching this film of Tsotsi is a quote saying "In this world...Redemption only just comes once". This means that Tsotsi is saved from his unpleasant life of killing and robbing to a life he can improve on when he was a little child.
