Athol Fugard worked this way when he made Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island.

NPR: Play Captures Life Under South African Apartheid

Fugard wrote Tsotsi as a very young man in 1960 at a time when blacks in South Africa were being forcibly resettled into townships.

NPR: 'Tsotsi,' a 'Gangster' Flick with a Heart

"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.

WSJ: 'Tsotsi' Is Transformed by Actor's Stunning Debut

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.

NPR: 'Tsotsi,' a 'Gangster' Flick with a Heart

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.

BBC: South Africa��s arty eastern 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.

NPR: 'Tsotsi,' a 'Gangster' Flick with a Heart

But in its brutal structure of white power and black penury, apartheid also contained visceral drama, stories of humanity willing and waiting to break out in a demotic exuberance which in his township work Mr Fugard caught so well.

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