“Between 2013 and 2023, the Slovenian Cinematheque preserved and digitized 179 short films made in the period of socialism (1945-1991) but mostly outside the state production system. We belatedly recognize these films as experimental and as an important, innovative part of Slovenian film heritage, which can now be seen again after a long time.” These sentences open Alpe-Adria Underground! A Brief and Imperfect History of Artists’ Film in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Making use of enthralling multiscreen juxtapositions, energetic editing and a thunderous electro-rap soundtrack, the film makes visible a vast, inexhaustibly rich swath of adventurous (so-called “amateur”) moving-image creativity in a compact 98 minutes. More than a dozen outrageously underrecognized filmmakers are highlighted in Jerman and Meden’s warp-speed survey: Boštjan Hladnik, Črt Škodlar, Ana Nuša Dragan, Davorin Marc, Karpo Godina, Vinko Rozman, Vasko Pregelj, Naško Križnar, Tone Rački and David Nez, Matjaž Žbontar, Franci Slak, OM Production, Vasja Bibič.

Almost half of these names are also featured in The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957-1988, the series of which this is the post festum epilogue. What the art and film writer Annette Michelson once said of Pavle Levi’s Cinema by Other Means (another recent and influential work that charted the terrain of previously invisible Yugoslav audiovisual experimentalism) can just as well be applied to this documentary: “Here is a work of truly original thought and research, drawn from material not merely unfamiliar, but hitherto unsuspected of existing.” May Alpe-Adria Underground! spark manifold imaginations, spurring viewers to dive deeper into a body of work as underseen as it is eye-opening.