Variations on a Theme

A scam purporting to offer long-deferred reparations to the descendants of Black veterans of the Second World War calls up memories in an elderly goatherd in Variations on a Theme, the top prize winner at Rotterdam this year. Hettie (Hettie Farmer) is the daughter of one such soldier, who after four years in the Native Military Corps was sent back home with a bicycle and a new pair of boots. Decades on, the inequities of apartheid still shape the contours of life in the village of Kharkams, as is revealed to us in droll and unassuming snapshots of daily life, filmed in widescreen compositions dripping with saturated color. The film casts its eye across the village, taking in its eccentrics, its dreamers, and its survivors, but returns again and again to Hettie. Her husband long dead, her body bowed, and her family pressuring her to move away, Hettie persists with quiet endurance. As she minds her goats and prepares for her 80th birthday celebration, an eloquent, ironic voice-over narration read by co-director Jason Jacobs (Farmer’s grandson) evokes her rich inner life. It’s a gesture typical of the film’s porous, unassuming realism, in which past and present, human and animal, quotidian and cosmic all exist on equal footing.