Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

For thirty years Embeth Davidtz has been a face on screen, in 'Schindler's List', 'Matilda' and 'Junebug'. 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' is her first film as a director, and she also wrote it, produced it and kept the mother's role for herself. It adapts Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir of a childhood in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Davidtz was born in the United States but grew up in South Africa under apartheid.

It's the run up to the 1980 election that will put Robert Mugabe in power. Bobo is eight, with a grubby face and tangled hair, and she roams the family farm on a motorbike, sneaking stolen cigarettes. Nobody at home reins her in. Her father, Tim, is away much of the time on patrol with other white farmers, her older sister Vanessa has her own worries, and her mother, Nicola, sleeps with a gun beside her and drinks her way through a family tragedy that has never healed.

The one person who really looks after her is Sarah, who works on the farm. Her husband, Jacob, doesn't like it one bit. He sees a little madam in the making, and with the guerrillas close by, that closeness could cost them. Bobo tells it all in her own voiceover, parroting what she hears at home: the Africans turned into terrorists and that's how the war started. Then one day she asks her mother: "Are we racists?"

Davidtz optioned the book to play Nicola. No writer got what she was after, so she wrote it and ended up directing it too. Her model was 'Empire of the Sun', where Spielberg showed the end of a colonial order through a boy's eyes. She shot in South Africa, as Zimbabwe was too unstable, with an all South African cast and crew. For Bobo she wanted a child who had never acted, and found Lexi Venter, aged seven. Zikhona Bali plays Sarah and Rob van Vuuren is Tim. Helena Spring, producer of the Oscar nominee 'Yesterday', shares the credit.

It premiered at Telluride in August 2024, played Toronto, and Sony Pictures Classics bought the worldwide rights. It was named best South African feature in Durban, Venter picked up a special jury mention at Palm Springs, and it reached UK cinemas on 3 October 2025. Critics were warm, singling out Venter, Bali and Davidtz herself, though a few felt the Black characters stay in the background.

• Drama
• War