Gavin Hood shot to fame in 2006 when he wrote and directed Tsotsi but this week it's a change of pace for the filmmaker as he movies onto the bug budget blockbuster X-Men origins: Wolverine.
Johannesburg born Hood kicked off his directing career in the mid nineties when he made several educational drams for the South African Department of Health, but it wasn't long before he moved into movies.
The Storekeeper, a short film, was next for him in 1998. The film went on to win 13 international film festival awards, including the Grand Prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival as well as landing an Oscar nomination.
A Reasonable Man was his debut feature film just a year later in 1999. The film followed city lawyer Sean Raine comes across a case in which a young herdboy named Sipho, in a remote rural South African village, has killed a baby.
The motive for the murder was the boy's belief that he was killing an evil spirit known as a "tikoloshe".
His next movie was In Desert and Wilderness in 2001 being called to fill in for Polish director Maciej Dutkiewicz who was suffering kidney stones.
But it was Tsotsi in 2006 that really saw Hood make a name for himself as a filmmaker. Tsotsi is based on South African playwright Athol Fugard's only novel.
Presley Chweneyagae stars as the title character, a teenager with a killer stare who lives alone in a ramshackle room in a poor shantytown, where he pulls off petty crimes with the help of three compatriots, Boston (Mothusi Magano), Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe), and Aap (Kenneth Nkosi).
But after they stab a man to death on the subway and Tsotsi (which means "thug" or "gangster") beats up Boston for trying to find out about his past, Tsotsi runs off to a wealthy section of the city, shoots a woman, and steals her car.
Only later does he discover that there is a baby in the back seat, and decides to keep it for himself.
As Tsotsi finally does look back at his own childhood, he tries to take care of the infant, carrying it around in a paper bag and forcing a young mother, Miriam (Terry Pheto), to breastfeed it at gunpoint.
The movie won the People’s Choice Award at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and Best Foreign Film at the 2006 Santa Barbara International Film Festival before going on to be nominated for a Golden Globe and winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Rendition was his next venture onto the big screen but it's Wolverine that looks set to propel him to the big-time.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the first spin-off from the successful X-Men franchise and sees Hugh Jackman reprise the role of Logan for the fourth time since 2000.
The movie follows in the footsteps of X2 and takes a deeper look at Wolverine's past, his relationship to Strider and Victor Creed and the ominous Weapon X program.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is out now
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
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