Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Needlessly chasing its own tail
Cynical perhaps, but it feels safe to assume in 2025 that a majority of Americans do not know that Rhodesia was a country, let alone that it was a white colonial project. And of those who do know, too many are sadly white supremacists obsessed with a racial utopia that never was. This historical ignorance puts Sony Pictures Classics at a disadvantage with Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a film whose distribution strategy would indicate a desire to find a North American audience (and potentially some awards). The soft-spoken adaptation of white British-Rhodesian Alexandra Fuller’s notable memoir about a childhood with white supremacist colonialist parents amid the Zimbabwe War of Independence (also known as the Rhodesian Bush War) captures the war that ended white rule in the country formerly known as Rhodesia through the eyes of an entitled but big-hearted eight-year-old Alexandra (Lexi Venter), who goes by Bobo. White South African actor Embeth Davidtz steps behind the camera for the first time and plays with fire by centering a colonizer story with mostly white creatives while trying to digest the racial narratives of the time and liberate the little Alexandra from the myopic and racist worldview her parents brought her into.
Set in 1980, Fuller’s story is told entirely from the perspective of Bobo. Different forces fight for control of the country in the civil war, but Bobo only knows how to divide her world into “terrorists” and people with the same skin color as her and her family. Her mercenary-soldier father (Rob Van Vuuren) fights for the colonialist cause and leaves often to kill the “terrorists,” while her mother (also Davidtz) enforces apartheid as a police officer. She repeats and articulates the unspoken racist lessons of her parents through a voiceover track that fills in her still innocent thoughts on the world crumbling around her. Sarah (Zikhona Bali), the servant and mother-figure, meanwhile, tries her best to impart a different vision of humanity to the young girl.
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