Ubuntu is a Bantu word for a traditional African concept that means a person becomes human through interaction with others or, “I am what I am because of who we all are.” The idea of Ubuntu is embraced by Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, winner of the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Based upon Athol Fugard's 1961 novel of the same name, the film focuses not on the sixties but on contemporary South Africa, a society twelve years removed from apartheid but still facing crime, poverty, AIDS and a huge gap between rich and poor. The violence it depicts is an everyday aspect of life in parts of Johannesburg and Soweto today but Hood does not glamorize it or distract us with bright colors, jump cuts or hand-held camera work ala City of God. Rather, he uses muted sepia tones and conventional styles to paint the bleak atmosphere of the slums to enter the mind of the film’s inhabitants.

Supported by the energy and rhythm of South African Township music called Kwaito, Tsotsi plunges us immediately into a world of shantytowns, poverty and cold-blooded crime. Tsotsi (Presley Chwenetagae) is a 19-year old reject, an orphaned hoodlum living in a slum across the river from the splendid high rise buildings of Johannesburg. In the “Tsotsi-Taal” language of the streets, Tsotsi stands for “thug” and we do not learn his real name until the film is half over. Together with his fellow gang members, Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe), Aap (Kenneth Nkose) and a teacher named Boston (Mothusi Magano), Tsotsi roams the streets looking for robbery victims, victims who often end up murdered. In one incident, the gang sticks an ice pick into the heart of a wealthy man on a Johannesburg subway for no reason other than he was counting his money in public.

When Boston vomits after the killing and questions Tsotsi about his understanding of the word decency and asks about his real name, the stone-faced hoodlum beats him brutally. But the questions continue to linger in the back of his mind. Out of control, he steals a Mercedes from a rich woman (Nambitha Mpumlwana), then shoots her in the stomach when she resists. When he discovers the woman's infant son in the back of the car, he is forced to deal with the questions raised by Boston. He takes the baby home in a shopping bag and tries to care for it, creating a makeshift diaper out of old newspapers, feeding it from a can of condensed milk. Confronted with the responsibility of having to care for the child, Tsotsi follows a young woman Miriam (Terry Pheto) to her home, then orders her at gunpoint to breast-feed the infant.

She is a widow who ekes out a living sewing and selling glass mobiles. Very gradually, Tsotsi is touched by her humanity and begins to recover his own. There is no epiphany, no single moment of transformation, only the gradual emergence of one man's conscience and his belated awareness of the realities of kindness and the sanctity of human life. The presence of the infant is the trigger for him to look at his own life. He remembers when his mother (Sindi Shambule) was dying of AIDS and his father (Israel Makoe), in a fit of rage, kicked his barking dog, breaking its back as causing a young Tsotsi (Benny Moshe) to run away and live in a cluster of drainpipes with other abandoned children.

Newcomer Chweneyagae delivers a luminous performance his gradual redemption, shown mostly by gesture and facial expressions, totally convincing. His character is never idealized or romanticized and Hood carefully avoids the usual sentimental pitfalls. As the police search for the missing child the baby's mother, paralyzed from the waist down, lies in a nearby hospital as Tsotsi returns to her home with his gang to commit burglary. Events take a surprising turn, however, leading to the film's deeply moving conclusion which left the audience frozen in their seats for five minutes after the final credits came to an end, many of their faces full of tears.