Embeth Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Photo by Coco Van Oppens. Courtsey of Sony Pictures Classics.
By PJ Grisar
July 7, 2025
Embeth Davidtz remembers the violence — and the fear.
When she was 8, she moved from bucolic New Jersey, with its rolling green hills and yellow school buses, to her father’s home country of South Africa. Newly off the plane, she remembers walking home from her bus stop and watching as police “chucked” and “bundled” a Black man into the back of a yellow van and drove off. (His crime was not carrying his identification.)
Another time, Davidtz was at a roadhouse with her parents stopping for hamburgers and saw a Black family with two young children. Two drunk white men approached the father, pulled him from the car and punched him as his kids looked on.
“It leaves an imprint on you,” Davidtz, an actor known for starring as Helen Hirsch in Schindler’s List, said in an interview at the Sony offices in New York. “I feel, on a cellular level, my whole being was sort of rewired seeing stuff like that.”
When Davidtz read Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, about growing up in Zimbabwe during and after its War of Independence in the 1970s, she saw a world she recognized and optioned it for a film, now her powerful directorial debut, out July 11.
She spent six years adapting the book into a screenplay, ultimately deciding to reduce its scope to Fuller’s early childhood in 1980, the year Robert Mugabe was elected prime minister. It was a moment of fear that Davidtz herself sensed during the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The 8-year-old Fuller — called Bobo, and played by outstanding newcomer Lexi Venter — begins the film in voiceover calling Africans terrorists, parroting the language of her mother, played by Davidtz.
Telling the story through the perspective of a young child, Davidtz hoped to convey the disconnect she felt between the way adults speak about conflict, and the world children see.
“I would see humanity, and I would see kindness, and I would see people being treated really badly,” Davidtz said. “I knew as an 8-year-old, there’s something discordant about this.”
The project took on new urgency for Davidtz, whose husband and children are Jewish, when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 as she was filming in South Africa. The script was locked, but Davidtz changed her approach in the edit, where she added images of violence on the television, playing in the background while Bobo snacks on cookies and watches.
“There are children in bomb shelters right now hearing that sound,” Davidtz said. “There are kids all over the world having that imprinted in them right now. And I wanted to put that more strongly in the film, because the horror of October 7, I could not shake it. I couldn’t shake what happened there and I can’t shake that human beings do this to each other”
(She believes the campaign in Gaza needs to stop, but the hostages also need to come home. “If you were to decorate me with pins, it would be all the pins, because I think none of this is solving the problem.”)
Filming Schindler’s List on location in Poland, Davidtz remembers seeing antisemitic graffiti and how the crew hoped the project would move the world forward. After Oct. 7, shehe wonders if dehumanization is once again winning. The child who shouts “Goodbye Jews” as the Krakow ghetto is liquidated in that film, absorbed those views from her parents, just as Bobo learned from her mother not to speak to Africans or that their Black servants don’t have last names.
But as formative an experience as the Spielberg set was, she says it was another film of his, 1987’s Empire of the Sun, about a young boy coming of age during Japan’s invasion of Shanghai, that served as a major touchpoint for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs.
“Empire of the Sun gave this notion of a child who’s been cosseted and given one point of view and not expanded by those parents,” Davidtz said. “And if it’s one thing that I’ve tried to do with my kids, I really try to give them both sides, and say, ‘You have to look at the world in its full entirety, and not just be single minded in one thing.’”
Like much of Spielberg’s work, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs excels in delivering a child’s-eye-view of the world. (Bobo even has a bike like the kids in E.T. — though hers is a motorbike.)
“It’s funny, I think I have an arrested development at the point of my youth, of the age that I was when I entered the world that I cover in the film,” Davidtz said. “And I think Steven has some arrested development in that area of his life.”
Shooting in South Africa with a mostly Black crew, Davidtz said the experience was liberating, if at times difficult when she depicted scenes of racist violence. (Zimbabwe, she hastened to add, had a much bloodier process of decolonization, though South Africa’s “went on for longer, and was much more insidious.”)
Pulling from her own life, she worked with Fuller to recognize commonalities between the two countries and underline the specificity of Zimbabwe’s indigenous culture, including a Shona hymn on the soundtrack.
Asked about allegations of white genocide in South Africa pushed by the Trump administration, Davidtz said she is baffled by the claim, likening it to what she heard growing up — or Bobo’s parents might say — as opposed to what she knows to be true from experience.
Davidtz is eager to direct again, but is looking for the right project, noting it has to be something she feels a personal connection to. But not too personal: When I mentioned Damon Galgut’s The Promise, the Booker-winning novel about a white South African family, with a Jewish matriarch who willed a house to their Black maid, she recused herself.
“He’s my best friend from childhood,” Davidtz said of Galgut.”I just worry about our friendship if I were the person trying to tell the story, because you have to take license.”
Davidtz said Spielberg has yet to see Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs, but his cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who first collaborated with him on Schindler’s List, has read the script, and gave some good advice as Davidtz panicked about the technical stuff.
“He said, ‘Embeth, you know this world better than anybody. You will know what the world needs to look like. So don’t worry. Don’t get caught up. Don’t let your cinematography take too long to light. Just shoot, shoot, shoot,’” Davidtz recounted. “I sort of went, ‘I can’t doubt myself. What I know is I’ve got to be inside this child’s face and head, and that’s the way to tell the story.’”