Ouma Hettie is an octogenarian goat herder in South Africa’s Kamiesberge. When she falls victim to a scam promising reparation for her father’s unpaid service during World War II, her family becomes more involved than she would like them to.
Welcome to the world of Variations on a Theme (Variasies op ‘n Tem) from writers/directors Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs (Carissa), which won the Tiger Award at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam and just screened at the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF).
“A poetic and distinctive visual style infuses playfulness into this insightful study of a woman’s resilience and a community that exists close to the land,” the LFF website said about the film.
Delmar, who also edited the film, came to London for LFF snd talked to THR about the musicalness of Variations on a Theme and how it may well be the only movie ever to be written on Microsoft Excel.
The film has a rhythmic dance vibe, a sense of an underlying choreography that you just feel while experiencing it – without necessarily being able to explain that feeling. And that is all by design.
“It all starts with Jason being a very perceptive and observant person,” Delmar tells THR. “He is from this village you see in the film. He was born there, went to school there, and then came back after living in Cape Town to live with his grandmother.” The duo actually made a short film there a few years ago, ”and I have become part of this community in some way as well,” he explains.
And the place has its own pace. “Anyone would be able to observe the routine, the rhythm of this space,” Delmar says. “If you sit in a corner for long enough, you’ll start to notice the routines and the rhythms that occur naturally. ‘Here comes Mr. So and So with his goats when the sun is setting,’ and so on. The routines are very ingrained into the space, and it’s very beautiful to observe the musicality of the space within that rhythm.”
That’s also where the title Variations on a Theme comes from. The repetition of everyday life also “harmonized, to use a musical term again, with the awareness that the exploitation that’s happening there in 2026 is merely history repeating itself,” the filmmaker tells THR. “What’s happening with villagers being scammed out of money is exactly what happened in the 1940s to [the protagonist’s] father, who was being exploited by the government at the time, which is exactly what happened to the people who were colonized going back several generations.”
Highlights Delmar: “So this idea of repetition became very important to our way of thinking, and then it was very natural to incorporate that into the structure of the film to show this repetition and the cycle of violence, and the daily routines of this woman.”
One possibly surprising tool to map out shots for the film to ensure the visual representation of this repetition and cycle was Microsoft Excel. Yeah, really! “I’ve joked that it’s the only film ever, potentially, to be written on Microsoft Excel,” says Delmar. “Because we have five story days, so we has five columns and then 30 shots that repeat like clockwork.”
And the filmmaker keeps the surprises coming. “We were borrowing from an Estonian composer called Arvo Pärt,” Delmar explains. He’s the big guy in Tallinn in terms of music, and he wrote music very formulaically. He came up with these almost formulas or equations for his music. He would work on a very small kernel of an idea or a seed, but once he unleashes that little seed, it manifests the most unbelievably beautiful and spiritual music.”
That served as an inspiration for Variations on a Theme. “We were interested in how we could contain the film into one core idea, and then almost press play on it and let it unfold,” Delmar explains. “It’s like an origami thing you do, and then a pop-up book appears.”