Igor Prassel

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.

To promote their book Bosnian Flat Dog, Swedish comics creators Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson tour the countries of former Yugoslavia with a mummified Marshal Tito in a refrigerator. They encounter a number of artists, musicians, publishers and other characters populating the post-Yugoslav indie cultural scene. As the journey continues through increasingly improbable surroundings, the protagonists begin to question themselves and the reality they find themselves in. Watching border controls turn into improvised snapshot sessions, admiring mutant iron-curtain Disney toys, buying souvenir grenade shell handicrafts and discovering sniper art in blown-out apartments, they find that truth may indeed be stranger than fiction.