The word tsotsi means hoodlum or gangster in the slang spoken in South Africa's Soweto township.
The leaders nickname is Tsotsi, and he lives up to its gangland implications masterminding robberies that often turn deadly.
We watch one that does, and then we watch Tsotsi beat up a follower who questions why it had to.
This music places Tsotsi firmly in the present, as do the billboards for AIDS prevention you see everywhere in the film.
And through it all, Presley Chweneyagae's Tsotsi makes his presence deeply felt.
Tsotsi is so startled that he wrecks the car and almost walks away callously, but then, for some reason, he does something uncharacteristic.
Yet the essence of the story has been preserved, along with the catalyst for Tsotsi's growth -- his accidental acquisition of someone else's baby.
Fugard wrote Tsotsi as a very young man in 1960 at a time when blacks in South Africa were being forcibly resettled into townships.
"Tsotsi, " in Afrikaans as well as urban dialects, with English subtitles, was adapted from the only novel thus far by the great South African playwright Athol Fugard.
Tsotsi is based on a novel by Athol Fugard who is better known for 20 astonishing plays that confronted apartheid on world stages for some three decades.
Yet such is the power of film -- and the supportive power of this film's pounding hip-hoppish sound track -- that "Tsotsi" dispels most misgivings as its hero works his tortuous way toward redemption.
AIDS, of course, is ravaging South Africa today as surely as apartheid did a generation ago, and the toll again weighs most heavily on children and on families, which is what Tsotsi is all about.
During one of those notable confrontations, Tsotsi threatens to kill an equally helpless invalid in the course of a squalid holdup, but he's befuddled, once again, by the passion with which the man pleads for his life.
For example, Athol Fugard, the internationally acclaimed Afrikaner playwright who wrote the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi and The Road to Mecca, a play about the local artist Helen Martins, found his muse in this scenic corner of the Karoo.
Fugard is an enormously generous writer, and in Tsotsi, he gave the filmmakers a framework that lets them find what he always finds in his best work, hope and humanity in characters that society writes off as irredeemable.
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