La Cappella Underground
La Cappella Underground was born in a time of great political and creative turmoil, in an original place: a deconsecrated chapel in Trieste. An “underground” location by definition, still very appropriate for a Centre for Film and Audio-visual Research and Experimentations, founded by a group of experts and amateurs of visual arts and devoted to the flee exploration of arts.

In 1969, an year after the foundation, the cinema section was opened, and it immediately turned its attention to experimental and independent cinema.

Since the beginning of the 1980s the association chose to part ways from visual arts in order to focus on cinema. From that moment on, it built a strong and solid relationship with contemporary national filmographies, by acknowledging value to every aspect of it, regardless of the “official” canon. One of its aims that resists today is being open to performances from every country, picking here and there the most innovative and unconventional works.

Media library
La Cappella Underground hosts the media library the Province of Trieste. It is open from Monday to Friday from 3pm till 7pm. It features an archive of more than 16.000 films, that are available for viewing on the individual stations in the offices of the association. The films are in analogue and digital format of different kinds (betamax, VHS, laserdisc, dvd). The catalogue covers the whole range of film history, from its origin to contemporary works. Besides, in the same opening times, it is possible to borrow the dvd films featured in the loan archive of around 1.000 titles.

The library of film books available for reading consists by now of more than 2.000 Italian and foreign books, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, handbooks and catalogues.

For further information, please contact mediateca@lacappellaunderground.org; phone +39 040 3220551. On this page you can download the pdf version of the catalogues.

Other activities
The organization of events, meetings, presentation of books and retrospectives is the core activity of La Cappella Underground, that often collaborates with other local and regional public authorities for a wider promotion of film culture.

Here are just a few of the past events and retrospectives: in collaboration with CEC Udine, in occasion of Innovaction 2007, La Cappella Underground organised the circulating film series Immagini dal Futuro (Images from the Future), focused on science and science fiction; it took part to to the first and second edition of FEST - International Science Media Fair; it collaborated to the organised the first edition of Festa Do Cinema Italiano in Lisbon, with screenings and meetings with the authors; it collaborates with FilMakers, meetings with the most important contemporary Italian filmmakers; it started Sci-Fi Club, weekly appointment with yesterday’s and today’s science fiction films.

Besides, there are the educational activities for the promotion of film culture, history and techniques.

Science+Fiction / Trieste International Science Fiction Festival
In 1999 La Cappella Underground started researching, recovering and archiving all materials and documents regarding the International Science Fiction Film Festival, that had taken place in Trieste from 1963 to 1982. In year 2000 the association decide to re-launch that festival, bringing the best science fiction back to Trieste, and giving birth to Science+Fiction. Every November the event features cult movies and long awaited previews, big names and talented young filmmakers, retrospectives, classics and rarities. The event is by now acknowledged as a launching pad for newcomers as well as a privileged showcase for the new trends in sci-fi, fantasy and horror cinema; it hosts celebrities such as Dario Argento, Pupi Avati, Lamberto Bava, John Landis, Christiane Kubrick, Terry Gilliam, comic writers Moebius and Enki Bilal, Joe Dante and Carlo Rambaldi.