Directors Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar push creative boundaries with Variations on a Theme

After winning the Best African Film at this year’s Joburg Film Festival,Variations on a Themewill have a limited one-week run in select cinemas starting Friday, 8 May 2026, over the Mother’s Day weekend. Directed by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, the 65-minute film also won the top prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The prestigious Tiger Award previously went to two-time Oscar winner Christopher Nolan for his debut featureFollowing.

Set in the mountains of Kharkams in the Northern Cape,Variations on a Themefollows Ouma Hettie, an 80-year-old goat herder who is taken in by a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s World War II service. Although it appears to be a documentary, the film is actually fictional, drawing on real-life experiences. It features Jacobs’ grandmother, Hettie Farmer and is inspired by his great-grandfather, Petrus Jakobus Beukes, who enlisted in the Allied forces during World War II at the age of 19.

Variations on a Themeis a masterpiece that unearths the memories of such unsung heroes and celebrates marginalised communities. These themes mostly underpin Jacobs and Delmar’s work at KRAAL, a production company based between Namaqualand and Cape Town. “We are all the consequences of our ancestors, the recent ones and those that date back millennia,” Delmar shared with me during our interview.

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“We carry in our bodies much of their memories and traumas, consciously or not. We live in the towns and cities that they built and their beliefs and ways of understanding the world shaped our present realities. So yes, in one sense it is a celebration but it’s also an act of witnessing something,” he added.

Shot over five days with 30 shots per day,Variations on a Themewas sparked by the need to confront the ghosts and grief haunting many people in the Kamiesberge region. “We spent time listening to the stories collected by our team at KRAAL and how these stories echo ancestral grief,” Jacobs also tells me. “A grief that is difficult to forget or explain.

It was a process of deep listening and patience, much like the stories in the film and it was worth the wait to tell this story,” Jacobs said. Born in Kharkams, the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year said he learned very late about his great-grandfather’s involvement in the Cape Corps. Upon their return home from war, these unsung heroes arrived at a now-barren place, displaced and isolated, with boots and a bicycle being their only compensation. Like many descendants in the community, Jacobs often wondered about the immense guilt, shame and disappointment his great-grandfather might have experienced when returning home to Kharkams.

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