Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not / Non ti scordar di me

Anja Medved, Slovenia, 2025, 104’ 

Personal childhood memories of the filmmaker and the participants reconstruct the landscape of memory in the border region of Gorizia, a place ravaged by war and political violence. 

As boxes of photographs and film reels are sorted through, a forgotten image of the border region between Slovenia and Italy emerges – a region torn apart by wars and political violence in the last century. The childhood memories of the oldest residents, however, also reveal a different past, a far more shared and intertwined past than the one we learned about in history textbooks. This documentary essay weaves together the memories of people from once opposing sides to rethink the meaning of home and belonging precisely 80 years after the end of World War Two. 

“In Arabic, the word for a human means ‘one who forgets’. Perhaps that is why humans have always tried to capture memory, carving it into stone, chiselling it into wood, writing it in books, and freezing it on film. They thus created a long poem, which, from the first spoken word, tells the story of humanity’s oblivion. But the people of this border region, where, in the past century, empires, states, and social systems collapsed in bloodshed, also remember the solidarity among neighbours, violently separated by history. They add their voice to the poem, which, in various languages, talks about the common.” – Anja Medved   

Anja Medved is a documentary filmmaker, video artist and theatre director. She studied Theatre and Radio Directing at AGRFT in Ljubljana. After graduating, she engaged in video and performance art as part of the Los Angeles art collective Microinternational. She has directed more than 25 documentary works, in which she mostly focuses on exploring personal and collective memories of the border area. Since 2007, she has managed the project of collecting memories on both sides of the Slovenian–Italian border between Gorizia and Nova Gorica. She has made many films in collaboration with Nadja Velušček.  

Talk: Anja Medved, Nadja Velušček