Ahead of the National Arts Festival screening of Variations on a Theme, filmmaker Jason Jacobs joins us for an intimate conversation about the artistic and political questions that animate his award-winning new feature, which was co-directed by him and Devon Delmar.
Drawing on themes of waiting, memory, historical inheritance and everyday endurance, the discussion explores how cinema can make visible the lives, rhythms and realities that often go unnoticed. Jacobs will reflect on the film's distinctive formal structure, inspired by the musical idea of theme and variation, and consider how repetition can become a powerful way of seeing, revealing new meanings in familiar moments.
Part preview, part reflection, this conversation offers audiences a unique opportunity to engage with the ideas behind Variations on a Theme before encountering the film itself, opening a space to think about how history lingers in the present, and how cinema can help us pay attention to what persists.
Production Credits
Moderator: Jefferson Tshabalala
Director: Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar
Screenplay: Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar
Producers: Annemarie du Plessis, Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar, Mira Mendel, Nikkie Thie
Cinematography: Gray Kotzé
About the Artists
Jason Jacobs's artistic interest is informed by his practice as an amagqirha-in-training and a Nama-Khoi-indigenous descendant living and practising in Kharkams. He understands dreams as lived/living spaces for healing and the embodiment of ancestral knowledge, which informs his reading of dreams (and translating them) as an indigenous healing practice and methodology. Working with dreams as spaces for healing, roots questions in the shame of loss as defining markers of his indigenous identity formation. Jacobs intentionally engages with this inherited and lived shame, acknowledging it as an ongoing path to healing (an act in progress and a call to action). Jacobs relies on the transformative potential of indigenous storytelling in his one-person play titled Kraal, to confront this shame of loss by writing and performing his own story-healing about a tragic hero character who is imagining new futures for his community.
- Venue: Ntsikana Gallery
- Location: Monument Building
- Programme type: Curated Programme
- Genre: ArtTalk
- Duration: 60 minutes
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Ages:
ALL AGES
- Language: English
