Variations on a Theme: Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition winner explores the beauty of everyday life in a remote South African community

• Reviewed from the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam

In the mountain country of South Africa’s Kamiesberg, Ouma Hettie (Hettie Farmer) edges towards her 80th birthday. She’s a goat farmer who wonders what the goats make of her. Is she a tyrant? Do they think she’s fair? Widowed, she lives alone, her house holding a small shrine of family photos, one of which is of her father, a Black soldier who fought in the Second World War and who was paid for his years of service with a bicycle and a pair of leather boots. We and the villagers are informed via a van with a loudspeaker that this manifest injustice is being corrected by the government. All you must do to make your claim is fill out a blue form and pay an administration fee. And 79-year-old Hettie does so, falling, along with the other villagers, for a cruel scam which endlessly delays the never-to-arrive payments while inventing further administrative loopholes and fees to be paid.  

Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are the directors and writers of the film and Jacobs narrates, offering a novelist’s access to the inner lives of the villagers. One older man, his head tilted against the wall with a smile on his face, dreams of a woman from the 1970s with large breasts. Another digs a hole in his house while hunting for diamonds, covering the sound of his digging from neighbours by playing Symphony No. 9 at full volume.   

Based on a collection of true stories and filmed with Gray Kotzé’s vivid cinematography, Delmar and Jacobs capture the variety and richness of life in the village which the villagers themselves can’t see. But the film is never patronising – there are people who see through the scam. “How is the government going to pay all these claims?” one says.  

The weather here is punishing, coming across the veldt in darkened swathes of rain, and the hard scrabble of their work on the land feels almost ancient, but modernity has invaded this remote community. At one point, the sound of hardcore porn emanates from a phone. The main story has the shape of an internet phishing scam, playing on the vulnerabilities of the old with semi-credible claims.      

What emerges is a beautiful portrait of a woman and a place. Hettie has embraced her solitude to such an extent that when her family turns up to celebrate her birthday, she is almost resentful of them. The noisy life they represent, the arguing, games, jokes and laughter, is something that she gazes at with less comprehension than she looks at her goats. Something extraordinary emerges from the film, the magic inherent in the ordinary time travel of a long-lived life.