UNDER THE UNDERGROUND

UNDER THE UNDERGROUND

UNDER THE UNDERGROUND

Director: Angela Christlieb
Documentary | A | 2019
54 min | Stereo

53rd Hof International Film Festival
2019

The documentary film leads through the improvised spaces of Janka Industries, an underground cellar vault and creative microcosm of the Viennese subculture. Chris Janka and his brother Ali are passionate inventors, artists, music lovers, sound freaks and electronerds. They have turned the empty basement of a factory building they moved into in the 1980s into a place that is unique and not only in Vienna: a creative microcosm of the local subculture. An occupied place, especially for working and living, but not really suitable for living.

But after 30 years, the cellar is threatened with extinction, because the new owner doesn’t want to extend the lease any longer. The film leads through the self-built and improvised rooms of this underground laboratory in the 7th district, called Janka Industries, where ‘Voodoo Jürgens’ and bands like ‘Petra und der Wolf’ or ‘Tankris’ rehearse and perform in the midst of a bizarre collection of electronic scrap.