Considered to be a genuine alchemist of film, Jürgen Reble made his first super8 films when he was still at high school. Later, during the 80s, he founded the Schmelzdahin group together with two friends. They began to explore various 16mm editing techniques and do research into film as material, research that would continue only when the group split up and led him ever deeper into the secrets of chemistry. His performances in which he would manipulate long loops of film in real time, immersing them in various chemicals or treating them using other techniques have become famous.
Zillertal is one of the first films that Jürgen Reble made after the Schmelzdahin group broke up. For several months Reble left some old film hanging from a tree. After taking it down again, he treated it with an optical printer, leaving its original images to come through only for brief moments. The result is a film which in some way is a testament to the mutability and inevitability of the physical decay of the material.