Professor Kosta Vujic's Hat

Zdravko Šotra's 2012 Serbian film is set in a Belgrade secondary school of the nineteenth century. The mathematics teacher Kosta Vujić teaches an extraordinarily gifted generation, and many of his pupils would later become prominent in Serbian science and culture. The axis is the teacher shielding his class from the institution. Vujić bends the regulations, takes responsibility for his pupils' outbursts and pays for it with his own position. The narrative rests on a text first staged as a television play; the cinema adaptation widens the period design. Aleksandar Berček plays the teacher. The tone is nostalgic and largely comic, and the narrative softens its conflict. Who it's for: those who like Serbian period films and school narratives. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a critical reading of history; the film presents the past largely within an affectionate frame.