Actor Embeth Davidtz’s directorial debut, ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,’ was filming during the Hamas attacks
Actor Embeth Davidtz’s directorial debut, ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,’ was filming during the Hamas attacks
Embeth Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren inDon’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.Photo by Coco Van Oppens. Courtsey of Sony Pictures Classics.
Embeth Davidtz, Lexi Venter and Rob Van Vuuren inDon’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.Photo by Coco Van Oppens. Courtsey of Sony Pictures Classics.
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.
Forwarding the NewsThoughtful, balanced reporting from theForwardand around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.
Forwarding the NewsThoughtful, balanced reporting from theForwardand around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.
Forwarding the NewsThoughtful, balanced reporting from theForwardand around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.
Thoughtful, balanced reporting from theForwardand around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.
Thoughtful, balanced reporting from theForwardand around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.
“It leaves an imprint on you,” Davidtz, an actor known for starring as Helen Hirsch inSchindler’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.
Source: Thezimbabwean
.
