Documentary Archive · Carnia & Friuli · 1943–1945

The Dino Ariis Archive

Films by Dino Ariis, with Piero Stefanutti.
Four decades documenting the last witnesses of war in the mountains of Carnia — recorded in Friulian, a language spoken by fewer than 600,000 people. Now carried, with English subtitles, to the wider world these testimonies deserve. Free to watch, forever.
DA
The Collection

The Ariis–Stefanutti Films

WWII testimony in endangered Friulian
Dino Ariis and researcher Piero Stefanutti spent four decades recording the last survivors of the Cossack occupation of Carnia and the Resistance in the Friulian valleys. These are primary sources — the voices of people who were there — preserved in a language that exists nowhere else.
Friulian Carnia, Italy 1943–1945 15 Films English · Italian · Friulian subtitles
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The Filmmaker

Dino Ariis is a documentarian from Carnia, in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border. For forty years he and co-author Piero Stefanutti tracked down and filmed the people who lived through the Second World War in these valleys — the Free Republic of Carnia, the Cossack occupation, the partisan resistance, the deportations — before those witnesses were gone.

His work includes the book «Le colpe degli innocenti», which used Austrian archive records to correct the historical record of the July 1944 killings at the Carnic malghe. The films and the book are, and remain, his — his research, his testimony, his authorship.

This archive exists to carry that work to a wider audience with faithful English subtitles. Nothing more. The credit belongs to its author.

The Films

Documentari di Dino

Carnia & the Republics

Carnia 1944, the two chapters of the Republic of Ampezzo, the Cossack occupation (Kosakken), and Das Blut der Unschuldigen — the core documentary record of the occupation and the brief free republics of the Carnic Alps.
Series

NEMICI

A ten-part series on the Resistance in Friuli — the war in the valleys, Porzûs, the foibe, and Bruno Fabretti's testimony from the camps. Enemies, neighbours, and the long reckoning that followed.

Institutional Recognition

Presidenza della Repubblica — Quirinale
Officially acknowledged
SGPR 0028366A — «di alto valore scientifico»
Library of Congress
Donation accepted into the collection
Arctic World Archive
In discussion — Svalbard glacial vault
Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia
Forwarded to the cultural heritage division