‘Variations on a Theme’ Review: A Woman Stares at Goats — and Looks Back on a Life — in Lovely, Lyrical Rotterdam Winner

On a faintly misty morning in South Africa’s Kamiesberg mountain region, 79-year-old goatherd Hettie (Hettie Farmer) watches her flock as they hobble and nibble along the rough, khaki-colored landscape, and wonders for the first time if they wonder about her. Is she a mother to them, or an omnipotent ruler? She’s not inclined toward sentimentality or anthropomorphism, and she’s had enough children of her own in a long, hard-up life. But poetry colors pragmatism in the narration that runs throughout “Variations on a Theme.” Liltingly read in a characterful Afrikaans vernacular by co-director Jason Jacobs, it dips in and out of various characters’ inner dialogues in the close rural neighborhood of Kharkams, seeing the philosophical substance in unassuming lives.

A deserving winner of the top prize in the Tiger Competition at this year’s Rotterdam festival, “Variations on a Theme” is itself a deceptively modest affair, running…