I'm working my way through Štefan Uher's back catalogue, and it's already abundantly clear that he's the most desperately underrated of the great New Wave directors - indeed, he's more than likely to be completely unknown even to people who recognise names like Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Jaromil Jireš et al. I suspect being based in Bratislava rather than Prague didn't help!Our love for Czechoslovak cinema will continue with a host of gems to come in 2013. A very exciting part of that will be the emphasis that we will give to the 'Slovak' part of that word by presenting to you a series of classic but unfathomably little-seen films which we hope will have the same impact as the discoveries you made with Second Run of films such as Marketa Lazarová and Szindbád. The films have all been beautifully restored by the Slovak Film Institute. A hint here of a couple of the films which we just know will be revelatory viewing... Štefan Uher's 1962 masterpiece The Sun in a Net (Slnko v sieti), and Eduard Grečner's beautifully poetic Dragon's Return (Drak sa vracia). We said a series... and we will give you more titles and more details on these in the months to come, and we hope you are as excited as we are at the prospect of making these films available for the first time to a new and appreciative audience.
But The Sun in a Net is widely acknowledged by historians as the first authentic "Czechoslovak New Wave" film, and it was massively influential on that generation - clips and acknowledgements come up again and again in the Golden Sixties TV series, and Forman in particular cites Uher as one of the single biggest influences on his own approach to film - ample evidence being provided by Black Peter and A Blonde in Love.