Audio Commentary
Making Film
Alternative Ending
Deleted Scenes
Short film
Music Video

In Gavin Hood's South African drama (an Oscar nominee for best foreign
film), the nonactor Presley Chweneyagae plays Tsotsi, a hooded, toughened
gang leader in a Johannesburg shantytown who kills for money and beats
his friend for challenging his dignity. When Tsotsi shoots a woman for her
car and finds that he has unwittingly absconded with her baby, he is struck
with a dilemma: what to do with the baby? This would be interesting if
Tsotsi's choice were not immediately clear. In a film depicting a seemingly
lawless society, where women are decent and men are helpless or derelict
without them, Tsotsi's painful attempts to care for an infant seem not
revelatory but calculated. Curiously styled, with rap-video camera moves
giving way to sensitive closeups, this reductive story of redemption milks the
sentimentality, rather than the profundity, born of an extreme change of heart.
In Zulu, Xhosa, and Afrikaans.