The Elusive Summer of '68

Goran Paskaljević's 1984 film sets a provincial Serbian boy's passage out of adolescence in the same summer as the political upheaval of 1968. For the boy played by Slavko Štimac, the university occupations and the student movement are a distant noise coming out of the radio; what actually occupies him is meeting a girl and getting out from under his father's shadow. The joke is exactly that difference in scale: history's great moment turns into something else in a small town. The father played by Danilo Stojković is among the best paternal portraits in Yugoslav cinema, a man who both crushes and protects his son while carrying his own disappointments. Paskaljević was expert at mixing comedy with melancholy, and the balance holds here. The distance between what the title promises about the student movement in Belgrade and what the film delivers is deliberate. Who it's for: viewers interested in Yugoslav cinema, coming-of-age stories and the peripheral echoes of 1968. Who it's not for: anyone expecting a political account of the movement, or troubled by the period's treatment of women characters.