“God Bless Africa!,” said Tsotsi’s director, Gavin Hood, as he lifted the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards last Sunday.

Back in his native land, both Hood and his film have been lauded. South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, heralded the award as “another well-deserved accomplishment of our country and people” in “a story of poverty, hopelessness and struggle transformed into faith and a profound moral reawakening leading to a better future”.

The first South African film to win an Oscar, Tsotsi follows six days in the life of the leader of a group of youthful gangsters. A heist gone wrong leaves Tsotsi holding a three-month-old baby. His decision to nurture the child sets him on a path of possible redemption.

The film is an adaptation of the only novel by the South African playwright Atholl Fugard. The novel ended bleakly, with the protagonist literally and metaphorically crushed by the apartheid regime. In a significant shift, the positive tone in Hood’s post-apartheid version suggests that, despite appalling problems – Tsotsi is an Aids orphan – South Africa is characterised by a mood of optimism.

Mbeki comments that Tsotsi is an appropriate representation of the “Age of Hope” that is the country’s current climate. Not surprisingly, Tsotsi has been South Africa’s biggest box office success for 15 years. It has also generated strong box office in the US since its release there last month, and imminent release dates in the UK and beyond should see the film programmed in both arthouse cinemas and multiplexes.

But rewind just over six months to the world premiere of Tsotsi at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Hood stood at the back of the Cameo cinema, eagerly asking the departing audience whether they had cast their votes as he tried to rustle up support for the festival’s audience award. When the FT interviewed the energetic 42-year-old filmmaker the following day he was upbeat about his third feature: “At the moment we’re pleased that it’s getting such a great reception outside South Africa,” he said, before adding: “The next step is, please God, that somebody buys it!”

He need not have worried. Later that week the film bagged both the Audience Award and the Michael Powell Award. It proceeded to capture a clutch of awards on the festival circuit, notably the Audience Award at Toronto, before picking up Hollywood’s big prize.

Tsotsi’s success was never guaranteed. But there were clues on that opening Edinburgh night that suggested it would break out of the arthouse circuit to which subtitled cinema is usually confined. Apart from well-defined, sympathetic characters, strong central performances and sharp cinemato-graphy, the director knew how to tell a strong story, in terms of both narrative development and visual style. But Tsotsi’s success is substantially built on the appeal of the ghetto and the possibility of the individual rising above his situation – a hook that was sure to catch the eye of film journalists and arts editors.

Shot on location in Soweto and Johannesburg, the characters speak Tsotsi-Taal, a blend of Afrikaans, English and local languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho. Like the Kwaito music, a South African version of hip-hop, featured in the film’s score, the characters’ language heightens the authentic effect. The language and songs of the gangsters’ world are shown in an intimate focus that rejects the notion that township life is one of unmitigated despair.

Admittedly this leaves the film open to the accusation that it slides into sentimentality, and in the long run the optimistic spirit that permeates it may be seen as unrealistic. History and aesthetics will be the judges. It will be developments outside the world of cinema, in the townships themselves, that will determine how the film is viewed in years to come. Whether the “Age of Hope” of which Mbeki speaks so confidently will prove more imaginary than material has yet to be determined. But for now, hope and aspiration in the ghetto are very much alive, both in South Africa and in Tsotsi.