Variations on a Theme

Ouma Hettie is an aging goatherd in South Africa’s Kamiesberge mountain range, famous for its lush wildflowers and granite formations. She and other settlers are drawn into a scam that promises her delayed reparations for her father’s unpaid military service in World War II, where he was drafted like so many other forgotten black veterans. Her daily rituals and carefully crafted routines are disrupted and her proud independence threatened in a tender and elegiac portrait of a marginalized community burdened by its historical legacy.

Like many descendants of South African veterans, Ouma Hettie has waited in vain for decades to receive compensation for her father’s wartime service, and the hopelessness that befell the poor veteran families gave rise to a modern-day scam that feeds on unfulfilled promises and the disappointed hopes of local farmers. Lyricism of the Variations on a Theme largely replicates the melodic structure of Afrikaans, capturing the subdued atmosphere and metaphysical beat of rural life and the endless grasslands of the veld. The directorial duo’s camera approaches plants, animals, and landscapes for which humans are mere passers-by with due respect, evoking the works of South African writers such as Herman Charles Bosman and Eugène Marais with its narrative sensibility.

The grandmother of one of the directors, Jason Jacobs, embodies Hettie, and her performance forms the axis of this poetic hybrid film. The unpretentious strength of Hettie’s spirit and the serene exterior of her persona counter the fragility of her sighing and sluggish body, as well as her steady and focused gaze that seems to look through the keyhole of past time. Eighty years spent on the shadowy slopes of the Kamiesberge, in a symbiotic rhythm with the land, have taught her everything there is to know about resistance and endurance, but also about the harsh coexistence with the ghosts of her ancestors, the burden of colonialism and unfulfilled restitution.