Variations on a Theme becomes South Africa’s official Oscar submission

South Africa has selected the Afrikaans-language drama Variations on a Theme as its official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards, giving a small Namaqualand story the country’s biggest international awards-season platform.

The National Film and Video Foundation confirmed the selection after an adjudication process conducted by a 13-member South African Academy Awards Selection Committee approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Screenings took place in Cape Town and Johannesburg from 1 to 4 September, with final deliberations on 9 September. SNG Grant Thornton audited the process.

Written and directed by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, the film stars Hettie Farmer from Kharkams and was produced with Kraal Stories, Meria Productions and Interakt in the Netherlands. It follows an elderly goat herder in Namaqualand who is drawn into a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s service during the Second World War. As she waits for money that will never arrive, her family considers moving her to the city, threatening the independence around which she has built her life.

How the film got here

The Oscar submission extends an unusually strong festival run. Variations on a Theme won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Best African Film at the Joburg Film Festival and Best Feature Narrative at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. It also received the Wild Dreamer Award for Best Film at Zagreb Subversive and jury special mentions at the Tarifa-Tangier African Film Festival and Transilvania International Film Festival.

Its selection is significant beyond the awards campaign. The film is rooted in Kharkams and features community members, placing a specific Northern Cape landscape, language and social history at the centre of South Africa’s international submission. Rather than scaling its story outward through spectacle, the production has built momentum through a tightly observed portrait of ageing, waiting, memory and dispossession.

A 13-member committee, audited process and Cape Town–Johannesburg screenings are the institutional story. The artistic story is that a goat herder in Namaqualand, performed by Hettie Farmer from that community, is now the country’s official face in the international-feature race.

What “official submission” does not mean

The submission does not mean the film has been nominated for an Oscar. It now enters the Academy’s international-feature process, where national submissions compete for a place on the shortlist before final nominations are announced.

South African coverage often collapses those stages. Selection is a national decision. Nomination is an Academy decision. Treating the NFVF announcement as an Oscar nod misleads audiences and inflates a campaign that still has to survive screening committees in Los Angeles.

For Jacobs and Delmar, the selection also continues the international trajectory established by their debut feature Carissa, which premiered in the Orizzonti competition at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival. Variations on a Theme is scheduled for two sold-out screenings at the BFI London Film Festival in October as its awards campaign continues.

Dutch co-production through Interakt sits in the credits without turning the film into a European product with a South African location. The committee’s job was to pick a South African film. The campaign’s job is to keep that specific.

Why Kharkams is the point

Afrikaans-language cinema that stays in the Northern Cape, with a community performer at its centre, is a different export from a Johannesburg English-language prestige picture. The scam plot — reparations that never come, a family arguing for a city move — is also a political story about waiting on the state and on history.

That is why the festival prizes matter as more than a list. Rotterdam’s Tiger is a serious art-cinema signal. Joburg’s Best African Film is a home-territory read. Together they made the committee’s choice easier to defend than a safer commercial title.

The film still has to be seen in South Africa beyond festival dates if the submission is going to mean something locally. Awards-season heat that never reaches Kharkams or a Northern Cape hall is a familiar pattern. Distribution, not the press release, will decide whether that happens.

What remains unresolved

There is no Oscar nomination yet. There is a national submission, a festival pedigree, and a London festival window. The next durable facts will be shortlist announcements, South African theatrical or platform dates, and whether Farmer’s performance travels in the campaign without being reduced to a symbol.

Until then, the accurate line is the one the NFVF can stand on: Variations on a Theme is South Africa’s official international-feature submission. Everything else is still ahead of the film.