Variations on a Theme is an award‑winning, poetically charged South African drama that has already established itself as one of the country’s most significant contemporary films.
It’s the second feature from 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Jason Jacobs and co-director Devon Delmar. The duo debuted at Venice with Carissa and went on to win the top prize at Rotterdam with Variations on a Theme.
An elderly goat herder in the mountains of Namaqualand, South Africa, falls victim to a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s WWII service. As she waits for money that will never come, the disruptions of her 80th birthday threaten to strip away the last of her independence. Structured as a series of recurring visual ‘variations’, the film transforms repetition into revelation to frame a portrait of waiting,
endurance, and loss.
The film unfolds over a recurring visual structure inspired by the musical compositional form of ‘Theme and Variations’. Each day repeats the same series of compositions, a certain number of fixed frames captured over five days, within which the smallest details shift and transform. The framing remains constant, but the life within each shot changes: gestures, conversations, and small movements become the material of variation. These variations accumulate new meaning, tracing the rhythm of waiting and the subtle peaks and troughs that define her days. Shot with a painterly stillness and accompanied by a score that develops through its own musical variations, Variations on a Theme observes how a life on the margins continues to replay the same unresolved histories, each repetition both the same and entirely new.
Variations on a Theme will screen at The Labia and Ster-Kinekor V&A Nouveau in Cape Town, as well as at The Bioscope and Ster-Kinekor Rosebank Nouveau in Johannesburg. This follows a three-night red carpet community screening in Kharkams in March 2026, where the film’s awards were celebrated with the cast and community.
Context & Themes
A place rarely seen. A story deeply felt
Variations on a Theme is set in the mountains of Kharkams in South Africa. An elderly goat herder, Ouma Hettie, falls victim to a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s WWII service. As she waits for money that will never come, the disruptions of her 80th birthday begin to threaten the last of her independence. Structured as a series of recurring visual ‘variations’, the film transforms repetition into revelation, framing a portrait of waiting, endurance, and loss.
A personal story rooted in family and memory
At the heart of the film lies a deeply personal connection. For Jacobs, Ouma Hettie is his grandmother. Her presence grounds the film in lived experience, while the story itself remains firmly fictional. Ouma Hettie stands as a symbol of matriarchal strength, reflecting countless South African mothers and grandmothers who carry histories that have never been formally acknowledged.
“My great-grandfather fought for the Allies in World War II,” says Jacobs, who narrates the film. “He was 19 when he signed up. Like many others, he must have returned with his head full of nighttime terrors, of artillery fire and screams heard in dark and foreign lands, of bombs, falling planes and burning cities. His payment after four years of service? At the harbour in Cape Town, before heading home to his goats, he received a pair of boots and a bicycle.”
Reparations and the politics of waiting
“While our film is fictional, it’s based on lived experiences,” says Delmar. “In many ways, these are variations on a theme. This community is still waiting, hoping and persevering, just as they have been since 1945.”
In this way, the film asks a difficult question. What does justice look like when generations have been made to wait?
From Kharkams to international red carpets
A defining aspect of the project is its commitment to community upliftment. Beyond the screen, the filmmakers and the wider KRAAL team, Cleveland Hopp, Woudine Dirkse, Adre Links, and Gladwin van Niekerk, have actively invested in skills development in Kharkams and the Northern Cape. Through theatre productions, film shoots, and hands-on collaborations, the community has developed a deeper understanding of collaborative creative work and its possibilities.
Director’s Statement – Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar
Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar are co-writers and co-directors under the collective KRAAL, based between Namaqualand and Cape Town, South Africa. Their productions reflect a strong connection to local culture and the natural world, integrating themes of consciousness and the non-human in their narratives. The duo’s projects include the feature films CARISSA, selected for Orizzonti at the Venice International Film Festival 2024 and VARIATIONS ON A THEME, winner of the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026. Their third feature, ALL I KNOW, will be released in late 2026.
Our approach to this story was gentle. Having Jason (co-writer/co-director) as her grandson, Ouma Hettie is used to the camera and film crews in her house. Whenever the camera is turned on her, she goes about her life as usual. The cinematography in this film was to have a light touch, not announcing itself loudly, but allowing things to occur spontaneously across the wide, still anamorphic frame. If you’re patient enough to wait for it, the magic occurs by itself. As Ouma Hettie’s memories come to the surface, the magic seeps out of the mundane, as though it’s always there underneath the surface, it just depends on how long you wait for it to reveal itself. Picture yourself sitting in the veld; your initial presence disturbs the quiet stirrings of animals and plants, but if you’re still for long enough and breathe gently, they start to emerge again out of the corner of your eye.
The main concern of our story is memory, and the gradual fragmentation thereof into old age. Ouma Hettie’s childhood upbringing as a goat herder between the mountains of Namaqualand played an enormous role in shaping who she is: self-reliant, stubborn, and wise as befits her years. As she was in a sense ‘tuned’ by the plants of the veld in her youth, spending long hours in solitude yet nevertheless in the wisdom of their company, we wanted this film to trace those lineages that ultimately go back to her father, a man whose story was not only important to that community but to the tumultuous history of this country.
Where would the descendants (like Ouma Hettie, Oom Hans, etc) be now had the veterans, who had sacrificed so much, been treated fairly upon their return to South Africa? The descendants are now dependent on grants that never arrive. We are showing a large swathe of the community in their domestic setups, and all of them are connected in a big way to the war and the legacies left behind by their fathers and grandfathers, whose spirits loom large over the story. The descendants are waiting, constantly on the edge of being acknowledged, but never quite there.
Across the five story days in the film, their desperation builds and spills over into an uncertain future.
Variations on a Theme might be the first film to ever have been written entirely using Google Sheets. We plotted the beginnings of the narrative against the x-axis (number of days) and y-axis (scenes), and each scene was written like a flashcard. These ideas were later fleshed out on set and in conversations with the men and women whom each scene depicted, some of them playing themselves, others bringing to life fictive characters like Trompie, who digs a hole in his bedroom to find lost diamonds. On our recces, the film crew walked around Ouma Hettie’s village of Kharkams in the Northern Cape of South Africa and took photographs of places where stories could be told. Or perhaps more accurately, where stories could both be brought to and found. We came away with a total of thirty-five still images, and in each frame composed a new narrative, strung across five narrative days, that permutates and develops as it goes. All of them interweave with each other to tell stories that all speak to waiting, to memory, to desire and the end thereof. We wanted to capture the ebbs and flows of the village, catching glimpses into real and
fictional lives, the magic and the mundane of each domestic setup.
With each frame, there are subtle and not-so-subtle variations that draw attention to themselves for merely existing, for being something out of the ordinary. We found that simply shifting a jewellery box, moving a picture frame on a cupboard, or placing a chair slightly askew altered our perceptions of that composition from the one that came before, such that it felt as though we were looking at completely different frames every day. It’s a film of details. Life on set across the five days became a thing of routine (it didn’t go unnoticed that we, the crew, were, as in the film, living out variations of our own). The camera tripod was set at the same spot, same level, and same specific lens (depending on the scene) over and over in each location until it became second nature to us, and we were becoming ever more sensitive to the spaces we were capturing and/or creating. Kharkams in the winter can be bitingly cold, particularly when the mists drift over the hills and cover the village like a thick icy blanket. The way the light fell in the mornings, for example, shifted every day and brought new surprises, new things unseen in the landscape.
Mikhaila Alyssa Smith composed a stunningly original score that mimics the structure of the story. Her score establishes a theme and she allows it to evolve and splinter off into new directions as Ouma Hettie finds and loses things to hold onto in her life. Inspired by such compositions as Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt whose music springs from a mathematical precision, and the sombre scores of Eleni Karaindrou, the shape of Mikhaila’s music is, over the course of the film, intimately in sympathy with the structure of the story as a whole.
SOUTH AFRICAN FILMMAKING
