When black South African military recruits returned home following World War II, it was as if they had never risked their lives for a cause occurring a continent away. As the archive footage and audio-driven prologue to Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s Variations on a Theme shows, they were given scant reward for their labours, often as little as a pair of new boots and a bicycle as they trekked back to their home villages, alongside a headful of memories and metaphorical scars to bear for a lifetime. Following up their Venice Orizzonti-premiered feature debut, Carissa, from 2024, Variations on a Theme (which has just won IFFR’s Tiger Award – see the news) should garner further international exposure for the directorial duo, making them cinematic ambassadors for their country, even if its modesty at only 65 minutes in length leaves something to be desired.

Beyond nodding to the classical music used diegetically and through its solo piano score by Mikhaila Alyssa Smith, the title also refers to the film’s deliberate sense of stasis, as it observes the ensemble of Afrikaans-speaking characters (who are mostly played by non-professionals) in its exterior widescreen frames: residents of the Kharkams village in Northern Cape farmland, who are descendants of fighters in the Native Military Corps, to use its exact name. Hettie (Hettie Farmer, director Jacobs’ own grandmother), an aged widow whose husband Petrus was in the forces, eagerly signs up to a scheme whereby a company liaising with the government will finally grant the veterans’ families greater financial compensation, but only after taking a processing fee themselves; with the majority of her neighbours also guilelessly enrolling, it is revealed to almost certainly be a scam. A third-person narrator (Jacobs, again) makes that unfortunate fact clear for us, alongside verbally dramatising the inner and outer lives of Kharkams’ other residents, in lieu of fully devised dialogue scenes. Those are solely granted to Hettie’s small narrative arc, as she’s visited by her large brood of adult children and grandkids for the classic South African pastimes of a “braai” barbecue and a televised rugby match.

The spirited camaraderie and unique banter (complete with asides on vampire and zombie movies, and Las Vegas gambling), expressed in the musicality of their region-specific accents, make up the film’s most endearing parts, allowing it to divert from its familiar festival docu-drama reflexes. With its running time only grazing a feature-length, more questionable is the array of moving parts that Jacobs and Delmar deploy, from the voice-over and score fighting for prominence in the sound mix, to the dramatic vignettes depicting, but not fully expressing, the locale’s atmosphere. The baseline circumstances of the premise are intriguing enough, so this greater stylisation and ironic self-referentiality aren’t necessary. Hettie’s daughter pleads with her to finally depart Kharkams, and relocate to a bigger and more prosperous town, yet the withered but steadfast matriarch will not be for turning – another variation on a theme so often portrayed in films of this nature.

Variations on a Theme is a co-production by South Africa, the Netherlands and Qatar, staged by Kraal (which also handles the world sales), Meria Produksies and Interakt.