This is hardly the first retelling of Bizet's Carmen. It's not even the first to feature an all-black cast, with productions as diverse as the Broadway musical Carmen Jones and the more recent “hip-hopera” with Beyoncé Knowles already lurking on the shelves. Still, U-Carmen eKhayelistsha, the cinematic rendering of the South African theatre company Dimpho Di Kopane's highly acclaimed stage production, loses no points for originality. This is not merely a successful retelling of a famous operatic tale; it's a compelling piece of film-making by any standard.

Part of that success relies on what remains unchanged, namely Bizet's score, which receives no more liberties than your average repertory production. But what is most memorable in this account, which won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, is how well the production transcends its original language and culture while retaining Bizet's original spirit.

Setting the story in a South African township and translating the libretto into Xhosa, one of country's “click” languages, presents some obvious challenges. Cigarette factories may be part of the landscape, but bullfights are rather less common, leaving Escamillo to be reinvented as a returning opera singer who sets the hearts of women in the local chorus aflutter. The country's indigenous vocal tradition dictates a rougher, less stylised sound than is usually heard in this music, though it does justify large groups of people spontaneously bursting into song.

Some of the recontextualisations are worth a few chuckles if compared with the original (“In the hottest part of the township with my friend Bra Nkomo - that's where I dance the Twalasta and drink sputla”) but taken on its own terms the new libretto never distracts. In fact, trading the socially disenfranchised gypsies in the original Seville slums for more contemporary victims of racial repression makes the original point all the more apparent. When this Carmen sings her climactic “Free I was born, and free I will die”, it can't help but make a dramatic personal and political statement.

The fact that so few of the performers look like “actors” is a mark of this production's roots. Most had originally lined up not specifically for casting auditions, the director admits in a telling interview included in the special features, but merely to get a job. Most had never even been in a theatre before, much less a production. In this case, the story behind the scenes is at least as dramatic as the one on camera.