13-08-2013

UK's Second Run Picks Up Home Video of Slovak Classic

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    UK's Second Run Picks Up Home Video of Slovak Classic Slnko v Sieti, dir. Stefan Uher

    The lyrical 1962 Czechoslovak love story The Sun in a Net (Slnko v sieti), directed by Stefan Uher will be lighting up British TV screens this week, following its release on subtitled disc by Second Run DVD. The ambitious indie distributor, specializing in  remastered classic European art films with newly translated subtitles, launched the release Monday.

    With such titles in its catalog as František Vláčil's 1967 epic medieval morality play Marketa Lazarová and Karel Kachyňa's 1970 paranoia thriller The Ear (Ucho), Second Run is well placed to promote the award-winning black-and-white film, considered a pioneer of Czechoslovak New Wave, to wider audiences. The release features a newly filmed introduction by filmmaker Peter Strickland, who has called the film a “beautiful gem which has lain undiscovered for so many years,” and a 20-page booklet with a new essay by author and film programmer Peter Hames.

    Sun is the first in a series of important art films from the period to be released by Second Run. Three more pending are Eduard Grečner's poetic Dragon's Return (Drak sa vracia, 1967), Juraj Jakubisko´s parable Birds, Orphans and Fools (Vtáčkovia, siroty a blázni, 1969) and Dušan Hanák's lauded documentary Pictures of the Old World (Obrazy starého sveta, 1972).

    The releases grew out of a joint effort between the distributor and the Slovak Audiovisual Information Center (http://www.aic.sk/aic/the-sun-in-a-net-on-second-run-dvd.html), with more such projects expected as the archives of the period are reviewed with an eye toward Western audiences.

    Sun was presented in a digitally restored version at the Karlovy Vary IFF last year in the fest's Out of the Past section, marking the first-ever DCP distribution organized by the AIC. It was later screened at the Cinemathéque Luxembourg during the  CinEast fest and this year at Cinemathéque Melbourne for the first Czech and Slovak film fest in Australia and at the Transylvania IFF, among other venues.