Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček: Zone of Transition

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Screening of film/video oeuvre 1998–2025
Screenings and talks
Wednesday, 17 December 2025, 8 pm
Slovenian Cinematheque, Miklošičeva cesta 28, Ljubljana

Programme at Slovenian Cinematheque, Vodnikova domačija, and Slovenian Film Database
(December 2025 – June 2026) 
17 December / 21 January / 18 February / 24 March / 21 April / 8 May / 10 June
Production: SCCA-Ljubljana and Slovenian Cinematheque
Curators: Vesna Bukovec, Robert Kuret

Anja Medved, Nadja Velušček, Forget Me Not, 2025


ABOUT THE PROGRAMME

Anja Medved (1969) and Nadja Velušček (1948) are mother and daughter who have been working together as a creative duo since 1998, when they made the short documentary film Cvetoča Brda (Blooming Brda) for RAI television. Their joint creative work began at Kinoatelje in Gorizia, founded in 1977 by sociologist Darko Bratina, for whom film was a means of gaining a deeper understanding of society. Due to the need for cross-border cooperation, the Kinoatelje Institute was also established in 2000 on the Slovenian side in Nadja Velušček’s house in Šmihel. She had been involved in developing the program since the early 1990s, and Anja Medved joined a few years later, after completing her studies in theater and radio directing at AGRFT. In recent years, they have been working within the framework of the KINOkašča/CINEMattic institute based in Šmihel near Nova Gorica, where the renovated attic is becoming a micro cinema. Nadja Velušček usually does fieldwork and conducts interviews with people during film production, while Anja Medved takes over the directing and editing process.

The films of Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček are, according to Andrej Šprah’s classification, mostly compilation documentaries. The structure of their films is rhizomatic and non-hierarchical: the narrative voices multiply to such an extent that the narrative is not “controlled” by a dominant perspective, but rather creates a network of multiple voices that come together in a cubist mosaic: Such polyphony is an authorial strategy that can only be used to delineate the field that these voices traverse, each understanding, appropriating, and using it in their own way and narrating about it—and only in this way can landscape entities such as Nova Gorica, Gorizia, Soča, Goriška Brda, and Benečija speak through their films.

As Anja Medved mentions, this view is a result of living on the border and attempting to give a voice to the border, to the borderline. And as Ervin Hladnik Milharčič notes in Mesto na travniku (Town in a Meadow), there are always at least two truths at the border: Soča is Isonzo, the Miracle at Kobarid is the Disaster at Kobarid, Nova Gorica becomes old Gorizia after crossing the Europe Suare… The border area is therefore, by definition, a place of many voices and thus opens up to history – or microhistory – from a bottom-up perspective. The work of the author duo Velušček-Medved consists of stories and vivid testimonies of ordinary individuals who are not part of grand historical narratives, personalities, events, and textbook facts, but are located in a kind of infraspace beneath the surface of what has become historical Truth through the process of signification.

It is also worth emphasizing the rich use of public and institutional archives, but above all personal and family archives, which are also entering the public space for the first time through filmmaking. At the same time, the creative credo of the duo Velušček-Medved is precisely the creation of archives and testimonies: film, as they say, becomes a by-product of the creation of archives and not the other way around. At the same time, they use various procedures to travel through different uses of archival and video material, including their own, and by duplicating images in different contexts, they make it visible how images are repeatedly appropriated for the purpose of a particular narrative or effect.

Since the Velušček-Medved duo mostly makes medium-length documentary films, we have formed pairs of films to review their creative oeuvre. And because the films are so open and thematically polyphonic due to their fragmentary, essayistic nature, practically every combination activates certain connections. Therefore, we wanted to design the program in such a way that the juxtaposed films would articulate the boundary and the borderline each time anew: as if we were moving from Nova Gorica to old Gorizia, from modernist architecture to the old town center. We looked for connections where this change would be felt primarily in the change of formal structure and film language, so that each film duo would best convey the polyphony so characteristic of every documentary film by Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček.

This May, the Cinematheque program is moving to the Vodnik Homestead (Vodnikova domačija Šiška), where a decade ago, Ljubljana’s testimonies about the period during and after World War II were exhibited in the exhibition Images of Oblivion: Personal Histories of the City of Ljubljana. Part of the program will also be available on the Slovenian Film Database (BSF), where you can view the remaining works of Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček. The review of their oeuvre is part of the traditional collaboration between SCCA-Ljubljana and the Slovenian Cinematheque, where we have previously presented retrospectives of key authors in the field of video: Miha Vipotnik, Ema Kugler, Marko A. Kovačič, Neven Korda, and Nataša Prosenc Stearns.

Robert Kuret

Zone of Transition I: Gorizia / Nova Gorica

Wednesday, 17 December 2025 at 8 pm, Slovenian Cinematheque

On February 10, 1947, the Paris Peace Treaty was signed between Italy and Yugoslavia, dividing the Gorizia region according to one of four border variants. Shortly thereafter, on April 18, 1947, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia decided to build Nova Gorica. A good half-century later, on the night of April 30 to May 1, 2004, Slovenia officially became a member of the European Union, and the area where the border between old and new Gorica used to be was named Transalpina Square. The barriers were finally removed on December 21, 2007, when Slovenia joined the Schengen area. These are the key dates in the films Town in a Meadow (Mesto na travniku), dedicated to the history of Nova Gorica, and Smuggler’s Confessional: Views through the Iron Curtain (Spovednica tihotapcev: Pogledi skozi železno zaveso), in which people recall memories of a place marked by the border.

The abolition of the border on December 21, 2007, was the occasion for organizing so-called Memory Collection Actions. As part of Kinoatelje, Anja Medved invited people to bring a specific photograph to the border crossing on Erjavčeva Street, where the customs office is located today, and share their memories of the border or smuggling goods across it. By 2018, she had organized five more Memory Collection Actions on various topics. The documentary video essay Town in a Meadow goes even further back in history and explores the creation of Nova Gorica in the middle of nowhere as a major project of the new socialist state. The story of the city has no protagonist, which is also reflected in the structure of the film, in which different voices dynamically multiply and intertwine with archival material.

While in Town in a Meadow the voices of individuals are intertwined with archival material and footage of Gorica, Smuggler’s Confessional, also part of the memory-raising campaign, is the author’s only film that explicitly separates the voices of individuals from archival images: the archival images only appear after the narrative in Carinarnica, thus freeing themselves from the voice that would interpret them, and thus taking on a life of their own, underpinned by the soundscape. They are transformed from illustrative material into a poetic impression.

Robert Kuret

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Anja Medved and Nadja Velušček.
 

Town in a Meadow
Directing, screenplay: Anja Medved, Nadja Velušček, production: Zavod Kinoatelje (SLO), Kinoatelje (ITA), Slovenia/Italy, 2004, SD video, colour, 63′
 
A documentary essay on the founding of Nova Gorica.
Smuggler’s Confessional. Views through the Iron Curtain
Director, screenplay: Anja Medved, production: Zavod Kinoatelje (SLO), Kinoatelje (ITA), Slovenia/Italy, 2010, video miniDV, colour, 22′
 
On 21 December 2007, when Slovenia joined the Schengen Area, Nova Gorica found itself without border barriers for the first time. The evening before, the traumatic border crossing area, which had separated the people of Nova Gorica from those of Gorizia for decades, was transformed into a meeting place. The room that had previously been used for inspections and interrogations was now equipped with a camera, where people could talk without fear about what it was like to live with the border, cross it, and smuggle goods. The shared memories and film documents show how two different realities can coexist in the same place. Each person who shared their memories was offered a caffè corretto – coffee with brandy, combining the two most smuggled goods, one from one side of the border and the other from the other.

 


Anja Medved (1969) is a screenwriter and director of documentary films. She graduated from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT) in Ljubljana, where she studied theater and radio directing under Prof. Mile Korun. After graduating, she collaborated with the stage structures of Projekt Atol, and after moving to the US, she worked with the Los Angeles-based art collective Microinternational. After returning to Slovenia, she assisted in several theater performances by Vito Taufer and directed the theatrical video installation Noč (Night), based on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film. In 2000, she prepared a solo exhibition, Frequenze Notturne, at the Kapelica Gallery and later developed her work in the field of video in solo and group exhibitions. She has conceived, directed, and edited more than twenty documentary films, most of which explore the relationship between personal and collective memory in border areas. Most of these were co-created with her mother, Nadja Velušček, as part of the cross-border organization Kinoatelje, where she worked as an author and project manager for more than two decades. She is the co-founder and director of the KINOkašča / CINEMattic Institute, a film production company and memory depository, and a mentor for documentary film at the Academy of Arts at the University of Nova Gorica and other international film workshops. She has received numerous awards for her achievements in filmmaking, including the France Bevk Award and the Slovenian Community in Italy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of culture and cross-border cooperation. (Photo: Bojan Velikonja)
 
Nadja Velušček (1948) is a screenwriter and director of documentary films. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana with a degree in Slovenian and Italian language. After completing her studies, she was employed at the Association of Cultural Organizations in Nova Gorica, where she participated in the development of gallery activities and film theater. She taught Italian and film and theater education in Nova Gorica and Slovenian language in Gorizia. On both sides of the border, she introduced experimental theater projects into the high school curriculum and encouraged young people to get to know the other side. In the early 1990s, she joined Kinoatelje in Gorizia, where she produced radio programs about film, co-organized Slovenian language courses, co-organized the Film Video Monitor festival, and helped shape the association’s program for almost three decades. In Slovenia, she headed the Kinoatelje Institute, where she devoted herself primarily to the creation and production of documentary films. She is the co-founder of the KINOkašča/CINEMattic Institute based in Šmihel near Nova Gorica, where she also lives. Together with her daughter Anja Medved, she has created thirteen documentary films, for which she has received several awards, including the France Bevk Award, the Slovenian Community in Italy Award, the Documentary Name Plaque (as part of the Dokudoc festival in Maribor), and in 2025, the Slovenian Directors’ Association awarded her the France Štiglic Award for her lifetime achievement in film and television directing. (Photo: Tomaž Skale)


Curators: Vesna Bukovec, Robert Kuret
Coproduction: SCCA-Ljubljana/DIVA Station and Slovenian Cinematheque
Partner: Slovenian Film Database (BSF), Zavod Kinoatelje (SLO), Kinoatelje (ITA), Zavod KINOkašča / CINEMattic, Zavod Divja misel (Vodnikova domačija), GO! 2025 Nova Gorica Gorizia
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana – Department of Culture
Thanks: RTV Slovenija, Slovenski program RAI, Andrej Šprah, Vlado Škafar, Tina Popovič