Variations on a Theme (2026)
Variations on a Theme, the film from Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, arrives garlanded, having taken the Tiger Award, the top prize, at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, and you can absolutely see what the jury responded to. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and it is a quietly powerful, beautifully made and deeply humane piece of work, let down for me only by a pace that tests your patience. Three and a half stars.
I will admit that for a good while I assumed I was watching a documentary, such is the unforced naturalism of it. In fact it is fiction, built around an elderly goat herder in the rural South African highlands who falls victim to a scam dangling the promise of long-overdue reparations for her late father's wartime service. It is a small, sad, infuriatingly plausible story, and it opens onto something much larger: the historical injustice done to the men of marginalised communities who served in the Second World War and were then denied the recognition and recompense they were owed.
That the lead is played by Jacobs's own grandmother, Hettie Farmer, only deepens the film's air of lived authenticity. Her performance is extraordinary, so unaffected and true that it is precisely why I mistook the whole thing for non-fiction, a face that carries a lifetime of endurance in every weathered line. The film is structured as a series of recurring visual variations, returning to the same images and rhythms, and it builds into a genuine portrait of endurance and loss that lingers.
And it looks superb. The cinematography is gorgeous, the vast, austere beauty of the landscape rendered with a real painterly eye, and the craft on display throughout is of a high order. Thematically it is rich and worthwhile, reckoning with colonial legacy, dignity and the slow violence of being forgotten, and there is nothing cheap or sentimental in how it does so.
What holds me back from going higher is simply the pace. Even at around an hour, it feels considerably longer, its contemplative, repetitive structure tipping at times from meditative into trying, and I found my engagement waning in stretches where a slightly tighter hand might have sustained it. Three and a half stars. Variations on a Theme is a formally assured, visually beautiful and morally serious film with a remarkable performance at its centre, and I understand entirely why it won what it won. I just wish it had carried me as fully as it clearly carried that Rotterdam jury.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country South Africa: District 9 (2009), Runs in the Family (2023), Dredd (2012)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: I Will Be Alright (2026), White Musk (2026), FarEye (2026)
