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I'm overwhelmed by it all,' shouted an ecstatic Gavin Hood, writerdirector of Tsotsi, as he addressed the world on television in English and Zulu while collecting the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for 2005. Tsotsi is the first South African film to win an Oscar, and its win brought Hood congratulations from all corners of his country, including messages from President Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela, who both heaped praise on the film. The story of a young black criminal's path to redemption, Tsotsi has caught the imagination of film-goers around the world.
Tsotsi's Oscar victory sparked a guarded sense of optimism in the South African film industry, which has fought hard over the years to find its place in world cinema. There have been many false starts in a country that is only now becoming comfortable with itself after a history of racial conflict and violence.
An Industry on the Outer
With its sociopolitical situation a source of world disapprobation since the imposition of Apartheid in 1948, South Africa's filmmakers were caught up in the boycotts targeted at the intransigent and racist South African government, with embargoes on anything South African being more the rule than the exception. Finding the offshore finance to explore honestly the social and moral dilemmas facing a divided nation seemed more difficult than feeding the masses on five loaves and two fishes. There were, however, some notable efforts by foreign producers between the 1950s and 1980s. Alan Paton's stirring novel Cry, The Beloved Country was first brought to the screen in 1951 by Zoltan Korda, then revisited more than thirty years later in a less than impressive remake. In 1987 Richard Attenborough directed the controversial Cry Freedom in Zimbabwe (the film was banned in South Africa itself), which told the true story of murdered black South African activist Steve Biko and his relationship with white newspaper editor Donald Woods.
Meanwhile, with South African filmmakers themselves unable to address apartheid at home due to government censorship and funding restrictions, comedy became the dominant genre in the local industry. Its most successful practitioner was the Afrikaans filmmaker Jamie Uys, who wrote, produced and directed twenty-four films that all made a profit (which is a remarkable achievement on its own),...