Tsotsi

With a friend, I ventured to see Tsotsi, not quite knowing what to expect. The movie, based on a novel by Athol Fugard, won an Oscar, and I had heard good things about Fugard from my friend, who had recently seen a play of his.
What I saw was a textured film about a young man finding humanity within himself and within others.
Tsotsi means thug, and in the film, the name is tied to a young man growing up in South Africa.
He roams the streets with a group of young men. Their existence is bleak and their moral code is corrupt. Their mode of survival is from taking, often brutally, from others.
That fact is established quickly in the first few minutes of the movie as we witness a simple mugging turn violent and bloody.
Then in a later scene, we see Tsotsi shoot a woman and steal her car. At that point, I wasn't sure whether I would ever sympathize with Tsotsi. I feared him to be a monster.
But behind even monsters is a human being, and slowly, Tsotsi's past of abandonment becomes clear. No one truly cared about him so he learned not to care about anyone else.
His world is changed, however, when he discovers that the backseat of the car he stole is not empty. It contains an infant. He ends up taking the infant home, struggling to figure out how to take care of someone so small.
His burgeoning relationship with the child transforms him. He begins to care. He begins to see another way.
And before you know it, you become invested in Tsotsi. You start to root for him to do the right thing, to be the man he was never taught to be.
The ending is a mixture of hope and bleakness, as is the rest of the movie. You don't quite know what might happen to Tsotsi after this experience. All you know is that he is not the same person you met at the beginning, and maybe there's hope in that.