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From Second Run's latest newsletter:

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.

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!

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.

I have the SFI disc of The Sun in a Net but haven't watched it yet. Looking forward to these releases!

I've watched the SFI disc many times. This is a great film. Intensely realized.

Great, great news. As Michael notes, and as the Golden Sixties series makes abundantly clear, Uher wasn't just a great lost filmmaker and this a great lost film: he was in many respects the key filmmaker of the New Wave, and trying to understand the Czech New Wave without access to this film is like trying to understand the Nouvelle Vague without Breathless. Even though he wasn't interviewed for the Golden Sixties series (too dead), there's probably more material on him and his films spread across the entire series than there is on any other filmmaker, even those with entire episodes dedicated to their careers.

After a huge amount of fruitless trawling through various online retailers in Slovakia, I think I've finally tracked down a copy of Václav Macek's 2002 book on Uher. Or at least someone's accepted my order without emailing me a few minutes later to say that it's out of stock.

It's in Slovak, of course, but multilingual OCR software, Google Translate and some very rusty but still extant Czech can take hitherto impenetrable texts a surprisingly long way these days.

UPDATE: Curses - spoke too soon! Not only is it sold out, but it's impossible to order from the publisher.

Sorry to take this a little off-topic. Is there a primer about Eastern European cinema? I want to delve into this slice, but I'm unsure where to start.

I don't know if there's a master primer list though the one which voted for Marketa as the best Czech film is a great place to bounce off of for that country. In general I've found using what Second Run has released is a good measure on how to get inside the various countries and see what you'll gravitate to. Their booklets also help a lot on this detailing the industry the films were made in very well and giving a strong idea of who respects what and why and how that influenced various things.

The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema is probably the closest thing to an overview, but it's an encyclopaedia rather than a guided tour - I use it for reference, but it's not ideal as a beginner's guide. The Cinema of Central Europe (ed. Peter Hames) in Wallflower Press' 24 Frames series might be better in this respect, as it contains detailed essays on key titles, presented in chronological order - so at least you get a feel for the historical/cultural sweep.

My favourite single-country surveys are:

Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic/Slovakia: Peter Hames is the runaway winner here with two books - Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition is a complete survey, while The Czechoslovak New Wave is an unmatchably exhaustive account of the 1960s (with lots of context before and afterwards).

Poland: Marek Haltof's Polish National Cinema is best for the strongest period of Polish cinema - the postwar years to the 1990s. Pre-1939, Sheila Skaff's The Law of the Looking Glass is admirably thorough, while Polish Cinema Now! covers the post-1989 period in much more depth than Haltof, especially the last decade. It also includes two DVDs of 21 recent Polish shorts, one per year. (Full disclosure: I wrote one of the chapters).

Hungary: John Cunningham's Hungarian Cinema - a thorough overview from origins to the early 2000s, that's particularly strong on directors like Zoltán Fábri who are revered at home but comparatively little known abroad.

I can't think of any other similar English-language overviews of other eastern European countries - glancing over my shelves, they tend to cover comparatively brief periods, like Dina Iordanova's Cinema of Flames (1990s Balkan cinema).

In quite a few cases, DVD booklet essays are more comprehensive than anything else out there. For instance, I don't know of an English-language survey of Polish documentary history that comes even fractionally close to the booklets accompanying PWA/NiNA's documentary DVD sets. I'm also reasonably certain that no other English-language pieces on Szindbád or Goodbye, See You Tomorrow can match the amount of detail in the booklet essays that I wrote for Second Run (let's face it, if they existed, I should have found them during my extensive research!) - and the same is certainly true of many of their other booklets.

UPDATE: I've just remembered that I really need to investigate Adam Bingham's Directory of World Cinema: East Europe, which was published a year or so ago - has anyone else read it?

I've read Hames' The Czechoslovak New Wave and recommend it highly if you're interested in these films in particular. It's very enjoyable to read in part because the historical context of the movement is itself quite interesting. Of course, Eastern European cinema has vast depths to offer beyond the CNW, but this is a marvelous place to start.

Very happy to see that this title is coming from SR, and looking forward to seeing what's in store for 2013!

Pre-order on Amazon: August 26

From the link above it seems that the release date has now changed to July 22. Is that official?

That IS official - the Aug 26 date was incorrect. THE SUN IN A NET will be released July 22.

Excellent! Hopefully, just a matter of time before Uher will be just as canonical as Nemec, Forman, Chytilova, Vlacil, Menzel and all the others.

Michael Brooke reviews at MovieMail

That's a great review and, if it's any encouragement to everyone involved to carry on putting writing of that quality on the MovieMail website, I shall be ordering a copy as a result. I imagine (and hope) that I will not be alone in doing so.

The Sun in a Net screens in a double-bill with Pavel Jurácek and Jan Schmidt’s Josef Kilián at London’s Riverside Studios Cinema in Hammersmith on Thursday July 25th from 8pm.

I now have a copy of the final version, and can confirm that:

• There's a previously unannounced extra in the form of a 12-minute video appreciation by Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland (who contributed something similar to Second Run's Szindbád);

• The booklet is by Peter Hames, and is exhaustively thorough, analysing the film itself in detail and also presenting it in the context of Slovak filmmaking. Since there's very little information about Slovak cinema in English (and much of it is in Hames's own books!), this is especially valuable.

• Running it side by side with the Slovak DVD, it's obvious that they're from the same source (the Slovak Film Institute's master). The Slovak transfer has a slightly brighter picture, but the Second Run transfer has a wider contrast range, and the slightly darker image does a better job of concealing occasional exposure fluctuations. There's very little in it, to be honest: if I didn't have both pictures in front of me, I'd be hard pushed to spot any differences. Anyway, in both cases, the picture is damn near pristine, and the transfer impressively detailed for SD.

• Subtitles are broadly similar in both, and I suspect both discs were fuelled by the same translation, but I notice that Second Run has strategically rewritten a handful to make them either more detailed or more idiomatic (subtle things like "I hope there won't be any clouds" versus "I hope there'll be no clouds").

Check out the new Trailer, specially created for our release.

Full details of the release now up at our website

The Digital Fix.