tsotsi

With a lot of my friends off in the Karoo desert for the weekend and a residual sinus infection, I've spent a lot of the past two days watching movies. Yesterday I rented this film Tsotsi, a word that I've heard a lot in the book I'm reading. In South Africa a tsotsi is a gangster or thug working mostly from the townships.
I can't get over how remarkable this movie is. Besides completely terrifying me of getting mugged, my house broken into, and Johannesburg (I know that may be stupid, but for some reason, probably based on everything I've heard from everyone here and from my parents, Cape Town seems so much more innocuous than its larger sister to the northeast), Tsotsi even made me shed a tear. And I don't cry over movies. Except for Titanic. I'd never heard of the film in in the States but it won an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Foreign Language film.



I sort of had a hard time sleeping last night after watching it. As I was shutting off my computer and putting the DVD back in the case I could hear someone's burglar alarm going off in the distance, and all I could think about was one of the robbery scenes in the film. While I know ever burglar alarm I hear isn't necessarily something like that happening, I always wonder what it is.

The bottom line on Tsotsi: if you find it, watch it.