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
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