Ok, with that brief bit of cultural education out of the way, allow me to recommend one of the films recently nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. Watching Tsotsi (2005), directed by Gavin Hood and starring Presley Chweneyagae, is in every way worth enduring the cross-cultural oddities that accompany the viewing experience here in South Africa. It is also worth the effort American audiences will need to make back home as they’re introduced to a new, strange culture over the course of the film. Tsotsi means “thug” or “gangster” in South African township slang, and it is the only name given to the film’s main character. Tsotsi moves in and out of a couple of groups composed of criminal leaders and hangers-on, and in the process of committing his own random criminal acts, finds himself struggling with an unlikely ethical dilemma.

Tsotsi—both the film and the title character—introduce the viewers to the unseen world of the Johannesburg townships, the crime and the “shebeens” that dominate the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Africans. The film was shot entirely on location in and around Jo’burg, so there’s no question about the authenticity of the many depictions of “informal settlement” living. Dialogue is carried out in a mixture of Zulu, Afrikaans, and township slang, and the film is subtitled in English. With a minimum of cinematic trickery, the viewer comes face to face with a world wholly unknown to Americans (not to mention the wealthy South African minority).

Beyond its verisimilitude, the film succeeds as a provocative tale of moral and ethical questioning. Does Tsotsi’s life as an abused and eventually abandoned street child exonerate him from the crimes he commits, or is his personal history a feeble excuse for his actions? And are the decisions Tsotsi makes when faced the film’s central dilemma inspired by fear, by an inner moral compass, by community mores, or by a desire for redemption?

The longer I live in South Africa, the more I am convinced that this nation is standing at a crossroads of enormous historical importance. Tsotsi is the South African story placed under a microscope. One young man faces his own crossroads and is propelled by forces he cannot hope to explain down a path that leads to an unknowable place.

Steven Nicholson is an American living in South Africa who wishes that his sizeable commission check from Cinekklesia was drawn in Sterling Pounds instead of American Dollars due to depreciation of the Dollar versus the South African Rand on foreign exchange markets. He also wishes for a pony.