ALPE ADRIA UNDERGROUND!, a documentary film by Jurij Meden and Matevž Jerman, brings the amateur film club scene in socialist Yugoslavia back into the limelight. Spaces free from ideological control in which many filmmakers from the 1960s onwards were able to freely explore the same radical possibilities of experimental film as their international contemporaries. Here, they were largely ignored by critics, historiography, and state archives. Only recently were hundreds of these films rediscovered and digitalized, thanks to considerable conservation and restoration work.
In this context, the program is dedicated to Vasko Pregelj (1948–1985). As an extraordinarily versatile individual in Slovenian- Yugoslavian cinema, Pregelj was a director, painter, sculptor, photographer, and theoretician. For twenty-five years, his films were considered to have been lost. They are among the rarest and most remarkable works of this movement. This offering, then, is a rare opportunity to discover an artist who, aged only sixteen, had already begun to combine painting, sculpture, sound, and image into one single artistic gesture.
