The Elusive Summer of '68 (Serbo-Croatian: Varljivo leto '68; Serbian Cyrillic: Варљиво лето '68) is a 1984 Yugoslav film directed by Goran Paskaljević.
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.
[1] 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.
The original screenplay by Gordan Mihić, titled "Samо јednоm se živi" (You Only Live Once), presented a story about the relationship between a grandfather, father, and son set in contemporary times (early 1980s) and was intended for director Živojin Pavlović.
Wanting to create a film that would contain his personal signature, he introduced certain details into the screenplay, such as a young Czech girl, graduation thesis on Marxism, and others.
Additionally, Paskaljević felt the need to address the events of 1968—protests in Paris, student demonstrations in Belgrade, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia—since his generation believed at the time that this year was pivotal, that something would change, and the world would become a better place.
When Paskaljević returned to Prague for his studies at the end of August, he couldn't find her, and he lost all contact with her (he only met Mirka again years later in America, where she owned a fashion boutique in Los Angeles).
The famous beach scene was filmed on October 5 on the Danube River near the village of Čortanovci in the Syrmia region, on the slopes of the Fruška Gora mountain.
"[7] When choosing the actors to portray the main characters in the film, Paskaljević immediately decided to cast Danilo "Bata" Stojković and Mira Banjac as Petar's parents, as he had collaborated with them in his first feature film, Čuvar plaže u zimskom periodu (Beach Guard in Winter), where they played Milovan and Spasenija Pašanović, the parents of the main character.
This highly successful duo also appeared the following year in Boža Nikolić's film Balkanski špijun (Balkan Spy).