" ... where life has no meaning, and survival is the only thing that matters." What overwrought bollocks. Welcome to the Miramax trailer for Tsotsi. "Now, the past he has forgotten, will give him hope for the future he could never have imagined. " I mean, to coin a phrase, who writes this shit? The other key thing you'll have noted about this trailer, which was on heavy rotation in cinemas, is that even though it's clearly set in a foreign land (a place without hope, you see), you do not hear a word of dialogue spoken in it, just the insincere-sounding voiceover man. It's almost as if, hmmmmmm, they don't want to put you off seeing the film by giving away that it's in a foreign language. I've seen this trick before - trailers for other big, Hollywood-distrubuted foreign-language films like Amelie and A Very Long Engagement and The Chorus were similarly unemcumbered by clues as to their nationality. Such details are only in small print on the DVD boxes too. (I once heard an assistant at Blockbuster warn two punters that Amelie was subtitled before they paid for it. On learning this, they put it back. The shop had clearly had complaints before and was covering its arse.) Now, are cinema and rental audiences stupid, or do we just behave stupidly because the studios and the marketing departments treat us as stupid?

Tsotsi is mostly spoken in a South African street patois. It's fascinating to listen to, as you can recognise a lot of English words, there's a bit of French in there too, and, presumably, Dutch. It's not an especially pretty language on the ear, but deal with it. This is a slice of life you just don't see depicted in films very much; certainly African films rarely get an international release, so that most of the images and stories based in Africa we see are viewed through the prism of Western eyes or colonial intervention (recent examples: Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener). Tsotsi, which means "thug", is set among the townships of Soweto, where poor black kids, including the titular junior gangster, travel into Johannesberg to rob rich black people and redistribute their wealth, with sometimes fatal consequences. This is not a film about race, but about class, or at least the class system that results from capitalism. At one stage, Tsotsi (played with incredible depth by Presley Chweneyagae) even threatens and humiliates a crippled tramp, also black. The only white face we see in the film is a cop, and he's not set up as the villain - indeed, his black deputies seem far more trigger happy. This is what makes the film so fascinating. Totsi seems cold and heartless. What is his problem? What happened to his parents?

It's gritty, yes, and unyeilding in what it portrays - it's been compared to City Of God - and yet it's beautiful to look at, with blood-red skies and lighting that's almost magical-realist, bordering on pop video style. This doesn't subtract from the reality of the drama. I'm not giving anything away that's not in the trailer by telling you that Tsotsi finds a baby in the back of a car he's nicked and this offers him redemption from his "life with no meaning". I strongly recommend you rent it when it comes out on DVD on July 17. I'm so glad I saw it, and no wonder it won the audience award at Edinburgh, which led to the Miramax deal, and the subsequent Oscar. There's no point bitching about the way it's sold, even though I just have, as it's surely better that more people see it. It's very moving, disarmingly simple, and a breath of fresh air after way too many American films in a row. (Oh, and another thing I hated about the trailer is the tantalising shot of a woman undoing her dress and turning round to face us. It looks sexual in the trailer, but in the film it turns out she is about to breast-feed a baby. Oh, how they trick us with our soft minds!)

"He was trapped in a trailer without subtlety . . . where voiceover has no meaning . . . and reassuring Western audiences is all that matters . . . "