Curators Matevž Jerman and Jurij Meden begins their new film with a bold declaration of the ambitious, ground-breaking work they intend to cover in it: “Between 2013 and 2023, the Slovenian Cinematheque preserved and digitised 179 short films made in the period of socialism (1945–1991), but mostly outside the state production system”. In Alpe-Adria Underground!, which screened at the Festival of Slovenian Film where it secured a Special Mention, the two directors conduct a grand documentary survey of these films that combine countless styles and sweep across a unique and unseen portion of film history from former Yugoslavia. Cheekily subtitled “A Brief and Imperfect History of Artists’ Film in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia”, the international title is naturally a reference to Slovenia’s geographical place between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea.

Directly after this text, writer-directors Jerman and Meden cleverly catch us off guard with a montage of clips from these socialist-era films accompanied by a rap song with a punchy trap beat (from Ljubljana-based hip-hop artist SBO), creating a juxtaposition of the immediately contemporary and slightly more foreign visual material. They then begin their exploration first by interrogating the concepts of the amateur, the experimental or the avant-garde film, and what, if anything, distinguishes them. What does it mean to be “experimenting”? Can these films really be categorised? Should they be?

Some answers are provided through interviews with curators, critics and filmmakers themselves, mainly shot on solid-coloured backdrops, a pleasant contrast to the busy and thriving works that the filmmakers try to explore over their short 95-minute runtime. But these answers are never bland: they’re rich and hyper-specific, a nod to this portion of Slovenian film heritage that’s really an open secret but has perhaps never been explored rigorously beyond the scholarly and cinephilic realm.

The directors cover much ground by employing the technique of collaging together multiple frames within the frame, a method employed by other documentary films presenting several art works, such as Baldiga – Unlocked Heart [+lee también:
crítica
ficha de la película]. This approach not only allows the viewer to take in multiple films at once, but it also leys Jerman and Meden (and editor Saša Škulj) play with our perception of a film. By playing different parts of a single work simultaneously and all in the same frame, they rebuild and remix each film for a documentary viewer, yet never in a crass fashion.

Composers Alenja Pivko Kneževič and Simon Penšek pair the work of different filmmakers with different styles of music, furthering this remixed quality: jazzy piano for Karpo Godina's semi-narrative films from the Yugoslav Black Wave, operatic and ethereal chorals for the surrealist and experiential work of Vinko Rosman. Through a loose video essay style, viewers are also able to latch on to pioneering Slovenian film puppeteer and animator Črt Škodlar, the communication-centric experimentation of Ana Nuša Dragan and the anonymous filmmaker behind OM Produkcija, who used a series of increasingly absurd pseudonyms as the author of his works. We learn that his oeuvre, astonishingly, included a tour de force two-hour film that includes over 12,000 shots intended to play with the viewer's perception and, by the end, hopes to even abstract the audience itself.

If the goal of Alpe-Adria Underground! is to showcase the inventiveness of Slovenian filmmaking during this time, Jerman and Meden have certainly accomplished their objective. But they also close the film with clips from more recent Slovenian experimental and avant-garde films, again accompanied by an SBO song. The directors very clearly bookend the film with sequences meant to catch our eye, seemingly signalling to viewers that these films have more contemporary relevance and didactic value than we might even begin to recognise.

Alpe-Adria Underground! is a Slovenian production by Temporama, co-produced by the Slovenian Cinematheque and RTV Slovenija and supported by the Slovenian Film Centre.