‘Variations On A Theme’ review: Rotterdam Tiger winner is intimate South African doc-fiction

Dirs/scr: Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar. South Africa/Netherlands/Qatar. 2026. 65mins

Rooted in place and yet hauntingly elsewhere, writing-directing duo Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s second feature  is a strange, touching, boundary-crossing study of dispossessed communities and human resilience, set in the semi-desert Kamiesberge region of South Africa’s Northern Cape. It centres on an elderly goat-herder called Hettie, played by co-director Jacobs’ own grandmother, also named Hettie. Embedded in the fabric of the film, this slippage between documentary and fiction is an integral part of a pure, fresh, surprising cinematic delight that was awarded Rotterdam’s top Tiger Award 

A boundary-crossing study of dispossessed communities and human resilience

Running at a concise 65 minutes, Variations On A Theme, which follows the filmmakers’ 2024 Venice debut Carissa, nevertheless has a cinematic arc – coupled with an inventive use of the widescreen format as a vector of the beauty of wild euphorbia-strewn landscapes – that may tempt adventurous distributors. Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which comes in at 68 minutes, proved that a theatrical avenue was viable for short features, though that hybrid documentary’s main berth outside of France was on streaming service Mubi, and this could follow a similar route.

This is, on one level, the story of a double scam. Around 80,000 black South Africans served in the Native Military Corps during the Second World War. Those who returned after traumatic years far from home – like Hettie’s father – were typically rewarded only with a pair of boots and a bicycle. Now, decades later, another injustice has arrived to compound that slap in the face. A company that purports to be liaising with the government to pay large sums in reparations is driving around the village where Hettie lives, soliciting applications from the servicemen’s surviving family members. The catch? They need to pay a service fee – just a little something, in order to get a lot back.

Conveyed mostly via the car-mounted loudspeaker announcements and WhatApps audio messages with which the scammers keep their victims hoping, it’s a bitter chorus that distils generations of similar tricks and blandishments visited on these dispossessed black Afrikaans speakers (who amount to more than half a million, concentrated in the rural Northern and Western Cape).

The swindle is cruel, but it’s turned around by focusing entirely on the victims, who emerge not as dupes but as stubborn dreamers. This strain of sympathy and respect is present too in the voice-over narration (again in Afrikaans) of co-director Jason Jacobs that binds the story together and gives it mythical resonance. It’s a little reminiscent of the narrator of Dylan Thomas’ radio play Under Milk Wood, as the inhabitants of this rural settlement are introduced and commented on by the poetic voice of someone who knows them so well he has access to their inner thoughts.

As we watch Hettie sitting placidly chewing on a piece of bread by the kraal in the karoo scrublands where her goats spend the night, the narrator tells us that she often wonders what the animals think of her: do they see her as a god? Or a mother? Mikhaila Alyssa Smith’s lyrical solo piano soundtrack, which sounds like it has arrived from some alternative, wealthy past version of this hard-graft community, enhances this aura of other-worldly strangeness and grace. There are moments of quiet humour too, like a motion sensor light in Hettie’s backyard that seems to have a mind of its own,

Other members of the community emerge slowly from a langorous edit: a raucous group of roadside domino players, a guy who is digging for diamonds in the beaten earth floor of his front room while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a 15-year old mother and her own single mother, a hairdresser who has jumped the gun by spending all his non-existent reparations money on new equipment.

But it is Hettie, with her magnificently stoic, noble face, who is the film’s bedrock. She never utters a word; other people, like the kindly neighbour whose fence she pauses by each day on her way to and from the kraal, or the extended family that descends on her one day, keen to persuade her to give up the goatherding and move in with them in the city, do all the talking for her.