Jože Dolmark

Experimental feature about two young men trying to make a film.

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.

This feature-length documentary about Professor Jože Dolmark shows the protagonist as a man of many insights, interests and talents; as an art historian, an authority on literature and the history of cinema and photography, a film critic, cineaste, screenwriter, actor, and above all an extraordinary teacher and professor, and in a new light: intimately, through anecdotes and his world view, as befits a man of his greatness. Jože Dolmark is a brilliant intellectual, an eloquent speaker, and an astute observer of Slovenian culture, cinema, and life at large.

It was only a card game in the beginning, but then it turned out to be a crime thriller. Frank is a man who works in a printing shop, and whose life was paid a visit by an uninvited man. Then he tries to take his wife and 8-year-old daughter to the island of Corsica, but the uninvited man shows up there as well...

This is a romantic family melodrama on lost and newly found love. A young diver sets off to work as a butler for Zlobec, a rich, retired pilot. In ten days the life story of the "pathetic old man" unwinds before his very eyes. On the last day of World War Two, Zlobec lost the love of his life when a plane named Herzog crashed into the Adriatic sea. Since then he has been obsessed with setting up an altar in her memory. Because of this he was blind for many things, especially for his daughter Ana, who grows into an attractive young girl and is seduced by the elderly Rihard at the age of eighteen. A friendship develops between the girl’s father and lover, but it is soon interrupted by a disastrous flood, which confines Zlobec to a wheelchair. Rihard sets of to seal the seas, while Ana moves away and begins to teach deaf-mute children. She only returns to visit her father once a year, on his birthday. When she returns this time, Rihard reappears and the old flame flares again.