The radio play for children offers a glimpse into the everyday life of hospitalised kids and their moving testimonies showing how, despite the difficult ordeal in the hospital, they also experience many beautiful things – they attend the hospital school, make friends from other parts of Slovenia, and have a visit or an adventure that will stay in their memories forever. Gently interwoven in the excerpts from conversations with the hospitalised children and the actors’ interpretations of their poetry created in the hospital school is the exchange of letters between the boy Patrik and his friend Mija, who represents a link with his home environment.
Script: Ana Obreza
Director: Saška Rakef
Sound design: Urban Gruden
Music: Darja Hlavka Godina
The play was created in cooperation with the Hospital School (Ledina Primary School – hospital school departments). Poems were written by Nuša, Tjaša, Timi, Domen, Petra, Dejan, Amadej, Martin, Matej, Šefika, Jaka, Lea, Klavdija, Tia, Patricija, Roza, Dragica, and Vanja. They were voiced by drama actors Matej Puc and Sabina Kogovšek.
Participating in conversations were Liam, Sara, Brin, Žan, Nuša, Jan, Dario, Matias, and Aljaž, recorded by the hospital department teachers Manja Žugman, Tina Žvab, Tanja Babnik, Sabina Andlovic, Ana Dobovičnik, Patricija Mavrič and Mojca Topić, the journalist Gašper Stražišar, and the dramatist Ana Obreza who designed the screenplay for the project.
The boy Patrik and the girl Mija were voiced by drama actors Jakob Šfiligoj and Staša Popović.
Fiction Editorial Board
Recorded in the studios of Radio Slovenia in December 2023
I Might be a Ray
ars acustica composition by Ingrid Mačus and Eva
The composition plays dialogue with the poem Who Am I by the young author Eva. Eva wrote the poem during her hospitalisation at the Pediatric Clinic in Ljubljana, as part of the activities of the Ljubljana Hospital School. The verses expand in a vertical from profound depths to the sunlit blue, as if inviting us to become a pillar of light in the timelessness of self-reflection. Composer Ingrid Mačus transmuted this sensitivity into a sound orbiting two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, a circle of documentary glimpses of children's views of the sea, the azure and the sun; on the other, one that whirls us with a speed managed by young, penetrating eyes alone, into the depths. As the sound fragments pile up, they accumulate like the rapid skipping of thoughts questioning identity. Only a gentle ray can escape this gravity, shining as honest and bright as the thought of summer.