Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (15)

Embeth Davidtz makes a quietly stunning directorial debut with this adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, drawing on her Zimbabwean childhood between the dying days of white rule and the uneasy dawn of Robert Mugabe’s new order.

Told through the eyes of eight-year-old Bobo (a remarkable Lexi Venter), it’s a child’s-eye view of war, loss, and ingrained prejudice on a crumbling Rhodesian farm.

Davidtz, who also plays Bobo’s volatile, grief-stricken mother, brings a raw authenticity to the family’s fractured life: sleeping beside an Uzi one moment, dancing barefoot in the dust the next. Her performance is as sharp as her direction, grounding the story in both intimacy and unease.

The film’s dusty landscapes and flickering lights evoke a world both dangerous and alive, its beauty undercut by violence and denial. Through Bobo’s bond with Sarah (Zikhona Bali), the family’s Black maid, the film exposes colonial contradictions with quiet precision rather than polemic.

A raw, humane portrait of displacement and innocence lost, it’s a debut that looks unflinchingly at Africa’s lingering ghosts, those its characters can no longer bear to see.(