‘Variations on a Theme’ Review: A Woman Stares at Goats — and Looks Back on a Life — in Lovely, Lyrical Rotterdam Winner

Key Highlights

• She’s not inclined toward sentimentality or anthropomorphism, and she’s had enough children of her own in a long, hard-up life.
• But poetry colors pragmatism in the narration that runs throughout “Variations on a Theme.” Liltingly read in a characterful Afrikaans vernacular by co-director Jason Jacobs, it dips in and out of various characters’ inner dialogues in the close rural neighborhood of Kharkams, seeing the philosophical substance in unassuming lives.
• Related Stories Westminster Dog Show Honors Catherine O'Hara and Her 'Best in Show' Legacy: 'A True Legend, Timeless Talent and Icon' 'Schitt's Creek' Cast Reacts to Catherine O'Hara's Death: 'It's Hard to Imagine a World Without Her in It' A deserving winner of the top prize in the Tiger Competition at this year’s Rotterdam festival, “Variations on a Theme” is itself a deceptively modest affair, running just barely to feature length as it takes in the rustling environmental details and the lolling pace of most days in Hettie’s small, deprived village.
• But there’s political and historical heft to this elegiac, tea-stained snapshot, as directors Jacobs and Devon Delmar consider how decades of compacted racial discrimination and governmental neglect have shaped the self-sufficient routine of Hettie and many others like her.
• Popular on Variety It’s a worthy, quietly more radical follow-up to the duo’s excellent, Venice-premiered 2024 debut “Carissa,” another portrait of a marginalized Cape community of the type that tends to get little representation in South African cinema.