City Cinema: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

Drama. TBD.
Dir: Embeth Davidtz, US, 2025, 98 min.
Lexi Venter, Embeth Davidtz, Zikhona Bali.
In English and Shona with English subtitles.

“Alexandra Fuller’s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia,  a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted… Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is set in 1980, just before and during the election that would bring the country’s Black majority to power. Bobo is a raggedy kid with a perpetually dirty face and uncombed hair, who’s seen at times riding a motorbike or sneaking cigarettes. She runs around the family farm, whose run-down look and dusty ground tell of a hardscrabble existence. The film was shot in South Africa, and Willie Nel’s cinematography, with glaring bright light, suggests the scorching feel of the sun. Much of the story is told in Bobo’s voiceover and in another daring and effective choice, all of it is told from her point of view… Davidtz’s screenplay deftly lets us hear and see the racism that surrounds the child, and the ideas that she has innocently taken in from her parents. And we recognize the emotional cost of the war, even when Bobo doesn’t. There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. But it is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this… It’s an extraordinary adaptation.” —Caryn James, The Hollywood Reporter