The screen actor Embeth Davidtz makes a great feature directing debut with this utterly heartfelt, beautifully shot and meticulously realised movie in which she also stars – clearly a passion project – showing a troubled world through the unjudging eyes of a child. It is an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s award-winning memoir of the same name, about her childhood in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the late 1970s, just before the election that brought Robert Mugabe to power, ended white minority rule and sent a thrill of fear through the world of the white farmers, including her parents, who saw which way the wind of change was blowing.
There’s a lovely performance from seven-year-old newcomer Lexi Venter as Bobo, a smudgey-faced little kid left to run ferally and blissfully wild on her family’s disintegrating farm. This is a place where her parents sleep cradling guns; her dad (Rob van Vuuren) is away much of the time on a paranoid protective patrol with other white farmers, and her mum (a bravura performance from Davidtz) is going not-so-quietly frantic with depression and drink. She is blearily determined to stay on and to ignore her neighbours’ uneasy awareness of her past bipolar episodes, due to a family tragedy.
