Mala Apokalipsa

Mala Apokalipsa is not a documentary in the strict sense of the word, nor a fiction. Paradoxically, the film could be called a “fantasy documentary,” as it still draws from a story that actually happened: the death of a place.
Čišnje is (or was) a small village in the Natisone Valleys, which the economic logic of modern life – like many other mountain or peripheral areas – condemned to abandonment and decay. In this case, the final abandonment occurred after the 1976 earthquake when the last residents were offered relocation to other settlements in the valley, even though the damage in the village was not that severe.
The narrative connects testimonies and memories related to daily life in the village and its decline – evoking compassion and pain – stirred by footage that seems to be eroded by the very content of memory itself, along with reflections and intuitions about the experience of time, which a landscape of ruins can awaken when seen from the outside, detached from personal biographical connections.
In places like Čišnje, the apocalypse does not appear loudly with the sound of trumpets: it is a sinking that happens quietly, as befits the “peripheries of the empire,” whose events do not attract attention and raise no dust: its visible form is a destructive force of life that, through its constant action, erases traces of human experience in the prevailing indifference to both small and large historical events.
And many future Čišnje and Natisone Valleys are trapped in a fatal expectation, to prove this.