In a co-production with the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television we will present the master’s project of director Lucija Trobec and dramaturg Luna Pentek: a stage adaptation of Veronika Simoniti’s Kresnik Prize–winning novel Ivana Before the Sea (2020). The one-woman performance features Iva Babić, a member of the SNT Drama Ljubljana ensemble.

The narrator returns from Paris, where she now lives, to the Slovenian coast to clear out her family home after her mother’s death. As she sorts through boxes filled with the belongings of those who came before her, she gradually carries an entire family history out of the house: memories, silences, secrets. Among a stack of yellowed photographs, she discovers an image of her grandmother holding her five-year-old mother with one hand and resting the other on her pregnant belly. The year on the photograph is 1943. This raises the question of what happened to the child in her grandmother’s womb. The narrator sets out to explore her past and her roots.

Sometimes we think we know who we are. We believe we know everything about those who came before us. Three women share fragments of their lives. Grandmother, mother, daughter. Three generations through which life has flowed. With every letter we read, we grow closer. We slowly piece together the fragments of memories into a story. In the end, in a quiet whisper in an empty house, the voice of a woman echoes, trapped in a moment of time that has already passed.