The Elusive Summer of '68

The Elusive Summer of '68 (; Serbian Cyrillic: Варљиво лето '68) is a 1984 Yugoslav film directed by Goran Paskaljević. It depicts a summer dominated by protests, as seen from the point of view of a teenage boy in Yugoslavia. Through collaborative work, director Goran Paskaljević and screenwriter Gordan Mihić have created a film that is both a love story and a political comedy set in the summer of 1968. The protagonist, high school graduate Petar, spends his summer in an idyllic and patriarchal province where the echoes of tumultuous global and domestic political events reach. His world is populated by women who are the objects of his youthful desires—married ladies, shy peers, provocative professors, and others. Parallel to the film, a television series with the same name was also produced, which was broadcast in the same year on Radio Television Belgrade. The Yugoslav Film Archive included the film among the one hundred Serbian feature films that were declared of great cultural significance on December 28, 2016. Plot During the summer of 1968, in the middle of various political changes in Yugoslavia, most notably student demonstrations, high school graduate Petar Cvetković searches for the love of his life by falling in love alternately and simultaneously with multiple women, mostly mature and married ones: a pharmacist, a baker, a librarian, both daughters of the president of the court, and his sociology professor, for whom he chooses a topic related to Marxism for his graduation thesis. The need to finally find the woman of his life leads Petar into a series of humorous situations, bewildering his father, a municipal judge with dogmatic beliefs who believes that youth should be raised with a "firm hand" and who suffers due to his bourgeois background. When Petar finally finds true love, a young Czech girl, their romance is suddenly interrupted by the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia which forces her to return home.