Vesna - still young

19 December 2023–20 April 2024

Vesna - still young

70 years of the Slovenian hit film

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of Vesna, one of the most popular Slovenian films of all time, which was filmed and distributed to cinemas in 1953. The plot of Vesna, the first Slovenian romantic comedy, revolves around a love story. The film captivated audiences and was the most viewed locally produced comedy in Slovenia for more than two decades. It was also the first Slovenian film to attract attention abroad and was screened in seven countries outside the former Yugoslavia. Its producers exploited contemporary techniques for promoting and distributing the film, organising film tours and official press conferences, while the leading actors became genuine film stars at home.

Vesna is the work of one of the most important filmmakers in the Slovenian territories, director František Čap (1913–1972), whose early films remain the subject of specialised research even today.

With the exhibition about the eternally youthful Vesna, we pay tribute to Matej Bor (1913–1993), the author of the film’s screenplay. The creative work for Vesna forms part of Bor’s rich legacy, which is preserved in the Manuscript Collection of the National and University Library (NUK). In addition to items from NUK, the exhibition also includes materials from the Slovenian Cinematheque and the Ivan Potrč Library Ptuj.

Vesna (1953) – Film Synopsis

The film’s story, which is well known to movie enthusiasts, begins one late-spring day in the mid-1950s, when trams still trundled through the streets of Ljubljana. Samo, Sandi and Krištof, three high school students who share a rented room in Ljubljana, are preparing for their matriculation exams. With their youthful laziness and the distractions of spring, they lack any enthusiasm for their mathematics studies, while the strict Professor Slapar, whom they call Cosinus, awaits them at the matriculation exam. Completely out of the blue, a solution to this “mathematical” problem is offered by Slapar’s daughter, whom the mischievous students have nicknamed Hyperbola. In order to get their hands on the matriculation mathematics questions, they compose an unsigned love letter, in which they rechristen Hyperbola as Vesna, the goddess of spring. However, it soon turns out that Hyperbola is not Slapar’s daughter at all… The film bubbles with youthful energy and mischievous buffoonery. Above all, it departs from the ideological and political greyness of the time.

Impresum