Name: Variations on a Theme
Released: 2026
Duration: 65 min

Rotterdam’s Tiger Award winner riffs on the many lives of villagers in a lyrical docufiction fable of a forgotten South African mountain community.

Hettie is a goatherd in South Africa’s remote Kamiesberg mountains. On the eve of her 80th birthday, she’s offered long-overdue reparations for her father’s military service in World War II. The only problem: it’s a scam. As Hettie and her neighbours wait for money that will never come, other villagers search for diamonds, watch rugby, play dominoes or slip into memories. Surrounded by ghosts of past conflicts, in a rural hamlet forgotten by South African society, they are victims of forces large and small – but each has their own rich inner life.

Staged as a series of ‘variations’, this hybrid docufiction takes a literary approach, narrating the thoughts of its subjects in a voiceover by co-director Jason Jacobs. His real-life grandmother plays the leading role of Hettie, and that intimacy is at the centre of an achingly empathetic film blessed with cultural specificity, lyrical imagery and an evocative score by Mikhaila Alyssa Smith. Jacobs and Devon Delmar won Rotterdam’s top prize for this follow-up to their Venice-premiering 2024 debut Carissa, confirming them as vital new voices in South African – and global – cinema.

“A beautiful portrait of a woman and a place … Something extraordinary emerges from the film, the magic inherent in the ordinary time travel of a long-lived life.” – Sight and Sound

Screening with short film Whispers of a Burning Scent