''Are we racists?'' That's the blunt question posed by Bobo, a white girl living on a farm in Africa, to her horrified (and defensive) mother.
There are so many ways this three-word line reading could land wrongly — or just seem forced or mannered. But it feels thoroughly organic when voiced by Lexi Venter, an extraordinary first-time actor who gives, at age 7, one of the more compelling child performances in recent memory in ''Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.''
It's a performance that was seeded, watered and nurtured by Embeth Davidtz, an extraordinary actor herself who wrote, directed and stars in this adaptation of Alexandra Fuller's admired 2001 memoir. One imagines Davidtz, in her triple role (and as a first-time director), had hundreds upon hundreds of decisions to make. Her most important, though, was finding and casting this youngster possessed of a wild nature, a mop of unruly hair and a face like a broad canvas waiting to be painted.
The movie, which chronicles one family's life in the turbulent, waning days of white rule in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), was not always going to be narrated by a child. Davidtz's first attempt at adapting the memoir, told in third person, was too remote, she herself has said. Then she zoomed in on the idea of telling the tale uniquely from Bobo's perspective.
Davidtz, who spent much of her childhood in South Africa, was drawn to the project because it recalled her own experience growing up in a world where racial inequality and violence were everywhere, but none of the adult explanations made much sense.
The director's own family life also included, like the Fuller family's, mental illness and alcoholism; she has said that neither the outside world nor home life felt safe.
And that's how it is for Bobo, 8 years old when we meet her, the younger of two daughters of Nicola and Tim Fuller. We will soon learn that another daughter died as a toddler in a tragic drowning — one of the reasons Nicola (Davidtz) is so emotionally tied to the family farm, as conveyed in one particularly brutal scene brimming with rage. She may not be native to the land, but her offspring is buried in its soil.
We begin with Bobo explaining how she's afraid to go alone to pee in the night. ''Terrorists,'' as they've been described by the adults, might lurk anywhere, even on the way to the bathroom, carrying a gun or knife or spear.