Greetings From Free Forests

Soroka’s debut feature drifts through the densely forested landscape of southern Slovenia like a lifting fog. It travels alongside the testimonies of hunters, foresters, foragers, cavers, pensioners et. al; that orbit the absence left by radical struggle after it has come to fruition and since faded. During WWII this forest was the sanctuary for the Partisan Liberation Front, who resisted the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. As this event wanes from living memory, what remains is not only its trace in the forest and its mark on the living, but also images that sought to preserve the revolution's emancipatory energy for future generations; images now stored in an underground film archive kept within the forest itself, depicting both the violence and the hope that came with radical change.