From Second Run's Coming Soon page:

"The Girl from Hunan (Xiangnu xiaoxiao) A film by Xie Fei China 1986

The heartbreaking tale of a young girl sold into an arranged marriage with a 2 year old boy who she must raise as his nanny until he is old enough to marry her. She is expected to honour tradition and to toe the line so far as social proprieties are concerned, but the young girl rebels against the edicts of her elders until at 16, she falls in love with another man...

Though set in turn-of-the-century China, The Girl from Hunan deliberately parallel the state of affairs in the China of the late 1980s.

Release date: TBC"

That's been there for ages.

We are on the case with this, skuhn8, but just don't know what the outcome might be. And I don't think we will have an answer imminently. But this is where we will first announce it when...

By the way, did you finally receive your Szindbad from Zavvi?

How about Fantom Morrisvillu / The Phantom of Morrisville (Bořivoj Zeman, 1966)?

Hotel for Strangers (Antonín Mása 1966)?

I gave up on Zavvi after waiting over a week and pushed my business to Amazon.co.uk. Got it. Watched Strickland and scanned through a few of my favorite scenes. Glorious.

Just too bad that the press and momentum from this release can't segue straight into a follow up Csontvary release. Oh well.

Not to pry into your books, but is there any indication that Szindbad sales benefited from the glowing reviews? Higher sales 'than usual' (however, one would define that)? I suppose it's still not going to get picked up by the casual rave/rioter demographic.

I don't know if it's any good and it probably shouldn't be the first Fabri, but is there a chance of getting Két félidö a pokolban?

Good movie (available on DVD in Hungary) except for the lame-o third act. Lubitsch was right about Hungarian plays (extend to films) frequently being excellent except for rubbish handling of the third act.

I just found out that Das Brot der frühen Jahre is actually held at various cinemas in Berlin and Vienna - so just in case you guys are looking for it.

Anyways, there is another German film I wanted to recommend, which may, at first not make a bell ring, but let me explain.

The film is called Ein Mann wie EVA (1984) and directed by Radu Gabrea.

Now, let me tell you what this is about: Gabrea has made a film about a filmmaker who is a direct reflection of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (RWF - here re-imagined as EVA). The faux Fassbinder is directing a film himself, an adaptation of "La dame des camélies". Sounds interesting, right? Now, get this: the faux Fassbinder is being played by Fassbinder-regular actress Eva Mattes (the daughter of Petra von Kant, among others), complete with fake beard, back then still in her 20s.
And now, look at these stills:

Still 1 - Still 2 - Still 3 - Still 4 - Still 5 - Still 6 - Still 7

I have no further info on the film itself, although there are dozens of reviews on it in german. It obviously handles Fassbinder's persona and reflects upon him after his untimely death. I think this is not just important for Fassbinder fans, but also for people interested in seeing a (very young, back then) actress portraying a male celebrity (something Cate Blanchet did later on with her portrayal of Dylan in I'm Not There), not to mention that the cinematography looks STELLAR. The film has, to my knowledge, not seen the light of day ever since 1984. So please, consider this one, as I think it fits perfectly into your catalogue.

A Man Like Eva opened theatrically in Britain, so there'd be plenty of UK press coverage. Here's Time Out, for starters.

OH WOW!

Sorry, but this is a bit of a shock. I have only ever heard of friends who saw a TV-taping of it that most be very, very old and from britain. Seeing that this has a theatrical run in the UK, while it is neglected in its home country is... striking, and proofs that international companies should really get a hold of some older german films.

EDIT: OH, now I realized, it opened back in the 80s. Sorry, my bad.

Still, proof that this film should get a chance to shine on DVD.

German films were still reasonably popular (or at least screened) in Britain well into the 1980s - in addition to the Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog titles, not to mention Heimat (shown theatrically before its TV outing) and István Szabó's German-language titles, there were plenty of other one-off oddities like A Man Like Eva.

It's only from about 1990 onwards that there was a really marked decline in distribution - I suspect the death and/or decline of the major auteurs was a contributing factor (Herzog was still producing great stuff like Lessons of Darkness, but Cobra Verde killed off theatrical interest in his work for an alarmingly long time).

Don't forget the briefly zeitgeisty Percy Adlon (now I'm really showing my age)!

I don't remember all that much about A Man Like Eva except that it was disappointing, not able to live up to its high concept. Considering how many Fassbinder films I had yet to see, I kept wishing I was watching one of those instead.

No more than I'm showing my age - I watched some of those Percy Adlon films in the cinema, and more recently rewatched Rosalie Goes Shopping when it had a DVD release.

Another German oddity was the comedy, or broad farce to be precise, Schtonk!. I found my old timecoded VHS review copy the other day. (I'm having a clearout/rearrange of my books and DVDs - not to mention some VHS I'm still keeping hold of.) IIRC reviews couldn't get past the idea of whether Germans had a sense of humour or not, and the film bombed theatrically. (Artificial Eye distributed it.) But I found it amusing enough, though that was back in 1993.

The problem with Schtonk! (a mammoth blockbuster in Germany, to be fair) is that it opened in Britain after the TV series Selling Hitler, a far subtler and funnier treatment of the same basic material (the Hitler Diaries scandal).

Let's face it, even if Schtonk! had had the exact equivalent of casting Barry Humphries as Rupert Murdoch or Alan Bennett as Hugh Trevor-Roper, it wouldn't have meant anything to a British audience.

In Our Time (1982) - The seminal film of the Taiwan New Wave, In Our Time launched the career of Edward Yang. Any Yang or Hsiao-Hesien would be terrific but there's also some other films from Taiwan that I'd love to see. Chen Kunhou's Growing Up which is similar to The 400 Blows, was the first film of the New Wave movement to attract broad attention and launched it's young star as a pop icon. Also, Wu Nien-Jen's A Borrowed Life (Duo-Sang) which was one of Martin Scorsese's favourite films of the 90s.

Any news on my recommendations?

Second Run should take a serious look at releasing Aleksandr Rogozhkin's The Chekist http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103949/which is to Russia's communist purges what Alan Clarke's Elephant is the troubles in Ireland. At a small satellite office of the secret police, an unrelenting series of wild accusations of disloyalty, cursory investigations and summary show trials ends in execution for just about everyone who walks through the door. Imagine that one moment in Tinker Tailor stretched into an entire feature. The film is primarily concerned with the effects of this unending evil on the psyches of the people who practice it. One of the few major masterpieces of cinema I've ever seen that plunge this deeply into the darkest heart of man.

This film would complement other important Second Run titles from Russia and Eastern Europe like Interrogation, but frankly I think it's an even better film that truly deserves a wider audience. I still have my old VHS tape that was from a small American outfit called Cinema Parallel that also did the initial U.S. home video release of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent and Bela Tarr's Satantango. The Chekist is definitely worthy of such company, like any number of other titles I've discovered through Second Run: it's one of the best films you've never heard of.

I've never seen The Chekist, but Rogozhkin's earlier film The Guard is near the top of my 'best films you've never heard of' list, and seems to be similarly elusive.

For most of the film, it documents the bleak, dreary routine of a soldier on a train, with the ingenious twist that there are no straight cuts, only dissolves, which gives the numbing routine a suspended, dreamlike quality (sort of like a squalid and brutal Picnic at Hangng Rock) - at least until events finally reach a crisis point and

I know I've banged on about this before, but it seems to me that post-Soviet cinema is the last bastion of hardcore European art-film values, and it's frustrating that so many of the great films of the last quarter century have never emerged on DVD - not even in their countries of origin.

You can easily add to the AWOL Rogozhkins a half-dozen Muratova masterpieces, Kanevsky's Freeze, Die, Come to Life and An Independent Life, Bobrova's In That Country, German's The Last Train and Paper Soldier, and Balabanov's Morphia. Aside from the surprising number of Sokhurovs available, I can only think of two films of that calibre that are available subbed (Cargo 200 and - soon - My Joy). (For the record, good as he is, I think Zvyagintsev is still a tier or two below that level, but he may well get there one day.)

The big problem for a Second Run release of these films is that, until they get a decent release somewhere else, you have to assume that there isn't a good transfer ready and waiting, and they're very unlikely to be able to fund one from scratch. And until post-Soviet cinema becomes a lot more fashionable and visible in the marketplace, most of the better-resourced companies (Criterion, MoC) won't be interested.

Thanks for the reply, zedz. The Guard absolutely sounds up my alley. And My Joy is at the top of my Netflix queue.

There might be a decent video master of The Chekist in Russia somewhere. I seem to remember an unsubbed DVD release that's now unavailable floating around during the time I was snapping up Sokurov discs from places in Brighton Beach and West Hollywood. Even though I can't understand Russian, I'm kicking myself for not having gotten it then.

That's simply not an option unless they can share the cost with other organisations - but, as you say, the likes of Criterion probably wouldn't be interested, and they can hardly team up with a fellow UK label.

At the moment, they're keeping a very keen eye on assorted government-backed restoration projects - there have already been a batch of Hungarian releases (with two more out this year: Szabó's Confidence has just been announced, and there's another Jancsó in preparation), and they've just started delving into the twenty restorations produced by Poland's revitalised Studio Kadr. There's also an even more ambitious Czech restoration project underway, whose first three releases are Marketa Lazarová, Lemonade Joe and The Firemen's Ball, but which includes quite a few previously unreleased Czech New Wave titles.

But I don't know if there's an equivalent situation in Russia: certainly Ruscico has been putting out quite a few pre-1990s classics (in fact, in many ways they were ahead of the curve on this), but have barely touched more recent titles.

Good news about Confidence.

Maybe 25 Firemen´s Street is also an option for Second Run.

I also remember rumours about Szabo having to cut 25 mins. out of Colonel Redl before release. Maybe there´s a director´s cut possibility down the road.

Fremantle have the UK rights, and their DVD is still in print as far as I can see.

There is an HD transfer of Adelheid available, administrated by Ateliéry Bonton Zlín. First Blu-ray from Second Run...?

Second Run has no plans to go Blu-ray - the economics just don't work out for them at present.