In search of lost language

The tale of two brothers who went their separate ways as youths and now live each on one side of the Slovenian-Italian border.  The first one was a committed fascist, and the second was a member of the partisan movement and held an office in the Yugoslav administration. The story begins when the first one has a stroke and he starts speaking in the language of his childhood, which his son doesn’t understand. The only person who can help is the care assistant who realises his desire to meet his brother. For both brothers and their nearest, this is an exciting confrontation with their past and themselves.

The idea for the production occurred in collaboration with Giacomo Pedini, the artistic director of the Mittelfest Festival, which, as a part of the European Capital of Culture 2025 – Nova Gorica – Gorizia wanted to present the stories of the population along the border in the specific and pivotal periods of recent history in the region. The inspiration for the trilogy is Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb – an excellent study of the demise of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the rise of Nazism through the eyes of Franz Ferdinand Trotta, a Slovenian by birth. The first part will dramatise the novel, the second will take place in the 1960s and the third will study the region in the present time.

The first and the third part will be produced by the Mittelfest, and the second, In Search of Lost Language, by SNT Nova Gorica. Goran Vojnović, an excellent novelist and the winner of three Kresnik Awards, wrote the text which has been directed by Janusz Kica, a master of sophisticated stagings of classical and modern texts. The production will take us to the time when post-war ideologies carved a rift between Italy and Slovenia, at that time a part of Yugoslavia. Through a psychological dissection of the characters and their family drama we will embark on a journey through recent history, its injustices and hidden secrets.

In Search of a Lost Language is a tale of unreliability of memory. The memory that is deserting us, the memory that is deceiving us, the memory that is dividing us. This is a tale of the bygone and the today, of the past that never managed to become the past and of the present, stifled by the past.

Goran Vojnović