From our collections – Nataša Barbara Gračner, recipient of Borštnik Ring Award 2025

This year's recipient of Slovenia’s most prominent acting award for lifetime achievement drew attention already during her studies at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television; for the role of Lucinda in the graduation play The Life of Playboys (based on the text by Dušan Jovanović and directed by Samo M. Strelec) she received her first award at the Borštnik Meeting (1991). In the following years, she went on to receive eight Borštnik Awards for individual acting creations, among them, in 2003, for the role of Helene in Before Sunrise. Critic Blaž Lukan captured her interpretation of that role in words: “A wounded but convulsively hopeful creature with a veiled beauty, which often manifests itself with severed roughness, pulsates within her like an organ that provides her with life, whereby /…/ rises above the materiality of the action and becomes a kind of abstract symbol for an almost ineffable – and never fulfilled – love.”