If the multiple casts of “CSI” lifted the prints covering the gold statuette won by “Tsotsi” earlier this month at the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, they would find evidence of a Who’s Who of South Africa. Only the C in their investigation would have to stand for “Celebration.”
“This Oscar must be the most handled in history,” director Gavin Hood said by phone from New York.
Hood, who updated and adapted playwright Athol Fugard’s lone novel for the screen, returned the night before from a 10-day victory lap to his home nation, where his parents still live. He’s lived in Los Angeles the past few years.
“We had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. We had a meeting with President Thabo Mbeki. We had a lunch with a special session of Parliament. We had a meeting with the mayor of Johannesburg, with the mayor of Cape Town. We had a parade in Johannesburg and then one in Cape Town.”
There’s no royal “we” implied in Hood’s account.
Since the Oscars, he and breakout star Presley Chweneyagae have been touring with the film. The two, said Hood, had a plan as their plane descended.
“We’ll get though passport countrol,” they imagined. “We’ll get our bags. We’ll change shirts. We’ll wash our faces. Then we’ll deal with the press.” Hey, it was a strategy. “Before we got off the plane, the press were at the door.”
Granted, this is South Africa’s first Oscar. (Last year, Darrell Roodt’s drama “Yesterday,” about a woman with HIV, was nominated). But the embrace of “Tsotsi” by its home country cuts deeper than its success on another nation’s shores.
“President Mbeki said something quite … quite … hmm, I don’t know what the word is. Quite unusual for a politician,” said Hood, who seldom has trouble locating a smooth transition between his deft cultural and political observations.
“Most politicians don’t admit to any kind of mistake, but Mbeki said perhaps we have made a mistake in focusing so much on what we’re doing in terms of housing and schools, and the integration of schools. Perhaps we haven’t focused enough on the soul of the country.”
Certainly, Mbeki could have taken umbrage. “Tsotsi” depicts Jo’burg, South Africa’s largest city, as a place with few haves and a vast shantytown population of have-nots.
The positive reception isn’t limited to politicians.
“Tsotsi” broke box-office records in South Africa when it opened in February, a month before winning the Oscar.
“It’s not just a white audience,” Hood said. “It’s broken through in South Africa across racial and economic lines. Nearly 70 percent of our audience is black South African. There were people who thought that wouldn’t be the case.” As grim as “Tsotsi” begins, some critics felt the movie ended soft on crime.
“People have asked if the film is a little naive,” Hood said. “Isn’t this sort of thing highly unlikely to happen?”
Arguably, that is precisely the promise and balm of fiction.
“When they say the story is an unlikely one, I’d say it’s true,” said Hood. “But I would also say that’s one of the reasons for its success.
“Why do people go to films, go to the theater or love art, anyway? Not because theater or film is necessarily documentary in style. For that they can watch the news. They want a story that is unlikely and therefore inspires.”
There are others who have suggested “Tsotsi” ends with a glimmer of light only because Hood and company haven’t experienced the type of crime depicted in the film.
“I have experienced crime. My lead actor has experienced crime,” he responded. Hood’s mother, a great influence on her son, has been carjacked more than once.
“It’s not a film we made because of a lack of experience. It’s precisely because of the reaction of people like my mother who choose to not see the world in a cynical way that you make a film that tries to say, ‘Here is a reality.”‘
But Hood offers an even more moving reason for the film’s impact on South Africans.
“The South African story itself is such an unlikely one,” he said. “The very fact that South Africa didn’t descend into a bloody, endless civil war is an unlikely political story. But it happened. When somebody like Nelson Mandela, with another somebody like Bishop Desmond Tutu and, to a lesser extent but a very important one, F.W. de Klerk – when those men got together and said, “Enough already.” He paused. “Imagine a different ending.”
When Hood stood on the podium at the Kodak Theatre, he began his acceptance speech with the declaration, “God bless Africa.”
He then insisted the camera acknowledge his co-conspirators, not just in moviemaking but in rebuilding a once riven country.
“Please stand up Presley
Chweneyagae and Terry … Put the cameras on them, please. Viva Africa. Viva.”
Viva, indeed.
