Producers: Helena Spring, Paul Buys and Embeth Davidtz   Director: Embeth Davidtz   Screenplay: Embeth Davidtz   Cast: Lexi Venter, Embeth Davidtz, Zikhona Bali, Fumani N Shilubana, Rob Van Vuuren, Anina Hope Reed, Albert Pretorius, Ronald Mkwanazi, Ricardo Genesis, Judy Ditchfield and Peter Terry   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B

Eight-year-old Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller (Lexi Venter) is navigating a life surrounded by turmoil in actress Embeth Davidtz’s writing-directorial debut, based on Fuller’s 2001 memoir about growing up in Rhodesia as the colonial country was being transformed unwillingly into the independent state of Zimbabwe.  Davidtz’s screenplay focuses on the first four months of 1980, when an election under British supervision resulted in the landslide victory of Robert Mugabe, the rebel leader who would effectively rule the nation until his downfall in 2017.

Bobo lives with her father Tim (Rob Van Vuuren), mother Nicola (Davidtz) and teen sister Vanessa (Anina Hope Reed) on a farm that’s hardly an epitome of wealth or white privilege.  It’s a hardscrabble place, but Tim, and especially Nicola, are determined to hold on to it against the encroachments of those whom they see as terrorists.  Tim is part of a paramilitary force enlisted to help the white government, and Nicola sleeps snuggling up to a rifle while he’s away, and can use it handily, as she shows when she blasts away a snake that’s invaded the home.

Nicola’s an unhappy, mentally fragile woman, traumatized, we learn, by the death of her toddler daughter, who drowned in a nearby pond; the child’s burial on the farm is one reason why Nicola is so determined to keep it.  Almost constantly inebriated, and often going to the bar in town to dance frenetically with the other white locals while Tim’s away on his police missions, she can’t be described as a loving mother to her two surviving daughters.  Vanessa responds with a teen’s typical disgust with what she has to put up with and a desire to escape, and she treats Bobo with disdain.  The younger girl, meanwhile, is struggling to understand the world around her while roaming about on her motorbike, cadging cigarettes from her parents’ packs and playing with the local black kids.

But at the same time she’s learning lessons about the distances between whites and blacks, made clear by her snooty grandmother (Judy Ditchfield), who criticizes not only the girl’s ragamuffin ways but her closeness to the Fuller’s black housemaid Sarah (Zikhona Bali), who in some ways assumes the role of a surrogate mother despite the warnings of her male counterpart Jacob (Fumani Shilubana) that Sarah’s endangering her safety by appearing too affectionate toward a white child. 

Not that Bobo considers Sarah real family: she’s learning to be fearful of all blacks as terrorists-in-waiting, terrified that if she has to go to the bathroom at night they’ll be lurking in the dark, and when during one of her rambles she comes upon a black family, she feels forced to share a bowl of soup with whom before hurriedly taking her leave.  But when violence does finally come to the farm, she’s not the target.

Bobo’s learning about her own parents and their bevy of white friends as well.  Nicola may be manic about keeping the farm—she goes into a helpless, frantic rage when she encounters poachers during a horse ride around the property—but Tim is less so, contemplating selling before the place becomes subject to expropriation by a new socialist regime.  And the atmosphere of the club Nicola goes to in her husband’s absence is marked by a devil-may-care abandon masking a mood of impending doom for the old order; it’s also home to the seediness of people like the obese, sweaty fellow the girls call Uncle Anton (Albert Pretorius), who actually takes the opportunity to come on lecherously to Vanessa there, something Bobo sees happening.

Davidtz gives a strikingly febrile performance as Nicola, a woman as much on edge as the country is, but her greatest triumph lies in drawing such a natural yet animated turn from Venter, whose Bobo is the linchpin of the film and whom she embodies without a false note, alternately gleefully childish and warily observant.  Of the others Van Vuuren is fine as a man attuned to the practical side of the family’s situation, and Shilubana equally so as a pragmatist on the other side of the racial divide, while Reed catches the desperation of a girl trapped in a world she’s come to loathe.  But it’s Bali most will remember; her Sarah evinces some of the traditional saintliness of the noble, motherly African woman who bonds with an unruly white child, but Bali also captures the poignancy of Sarah’s knowledge that her feelings are not fully reciprocated.  Her final scene, an epiphany of sorts, takes on a poetic sheen that seems out of synch with the film’s overall realistic tone, but it’s undeniably effective.

The grubbiness of the background is rendered expressively in Anneke Dempsey’s production design, Monique Lamprecht’s costumes and Willie Nel’s cinematography, which uses the South African locales to good effect; Nicolas Costaras edits efficiently, refusing to linger even in the biggest moments (except at the very end), and Chris Letcher’s score refrains from an excess of local color.

The result is a film that, like Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” evokes a child’s eye view of a society coming apart at the seams, for good or ill (and the sad fact is that Zimbabwe has not exactly prospered since 1980).  But Branagh’s film was more sentimental than Davidtz’s clear-eyed portrait of a family’s struggle to cope with their own domestic troubles and their country’s revolutionary transformation, marked by a brilliant performance from young Venter.