Alpe-Adria Underground!

Between 2013 and 2023, Slovenian Cinematheque preserved and digitized 179 short films created on a tiny stretch of land between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea in the period of socialism (1945-1991), but mostly outside the prevailing state production. Today, we belatedly recognize these films as experimental and as an important, innovative part of the Slovenian film heritage, visible again for the first time after decades. The production of Alpe-Adria Underground! has radically accelerated efforts to preserve, digitize and restore this segment of Slovenian cinema.

«In Slovenia, we used a slightly derogatory label “amateur film” to dismiss any sort of filmmaking that existed outside the official, state-sanctioned film production. As a result, these “amateur” films were not systematically preserved by any film collecting institution. We hope that our documentary films show that during the period of socialism in Slovenia (1945-1991) certain “amateurs” have produced a significant corpus of completely original images that we can today belatedly recognize as the history of Slovenian experimental film.»

– Jurij Meden

«The process of creating this film could, in a way, be compared to a unique treasure hunt. During the exploration and digitization, we sometimes stumbled upon cinematic gems that we knew very little about beforehand. Time and again, it became evident that there exists a parallel, yet practically unknown film history in our midst, which, thanks to new technologies, is gradually becoming visible again. The film presents glimpse fragments of sixty-three films that testify to an exciting independent experimental scene from the – to borrow a quote from Silvan Furlan – golden age of the underground, when the freedom of filmmaking was written in capital letters.»

– Matevž Jerman