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Peter Solan's Before Tonight Is Over (Kým sa skončí táto noc), announced in the latest Second Run Newsletter.

Available on Blu-ray June 14


“A remarkably fluid, free-flowing affair, revelling in the caprices of its liquored-up characters... it’s a joyous discovery and essential catch-up viewing for anyone already bitten by the Czechoslovakian New Wave bug.”
Cerise Howard, Senses of Cinema


One of the great gems of Slovak cinema, Peter Solan's daring and tender drama makes its world Blu-ray premiere via Second Run.

Set entirely in a nightclub in a mountain ski resort over one eventful evening, Before Tonight is Over brings together an exceptional cast as they drink, dance, flirt, and fight in a delightful, kaleidoscopic character study.

Highly improvised and experimental in its approach, the film achieves a remarkable, intimate naturalism, offering a sharp critique of then-contemporary life as the characters gradually reveal their unfulfilled dreams, delusions and disappointments. Once condemned for its depiction of societies vices, the radical Before Tonight is Over remains a potent work of wit and wisdom.

Our world-premiere, region-free Blu-ray edition from a new 2K HD master features a newly filmed appreciation of the film, plus two contemporaneous short films reflecting the locale and milieu of the film.



“A tiny capsule, uniquely preserved from a very brief time in history, yet it still rings perfectly true... a beautifully innovative cinematic experience, and a true hidden gem of a film that deserves greater attention.”
Bonjour Tristesse

I hope The Boxer and Death also gets a release at some point. This is definitely the most exciting release since Tomorrow I'll Wake Up..., though.

Price drop! Now £15.99 at Amazon UK

I really like to order this but Amazon’s page still shows blank. :-k

I realize this is taking empathic aim at a specific pathos for the lives of a range of young to middle-age adults under communist rule, but on a universal level I found this to be a fascinatingly accurate depiction of a night at the bar. Its banal conversation, vapid and fleeting interactions, false courage, and desperate receptiveness by insecure and lonely people might breed a sense of artificiality in a lesser film. However, the filmmaker inverts the surface-level activity to unveil a deep authenticity of vulnerable cores within these people, who are desperately trying to connect underneath all this sloppy interpersonal soft-chaos.

This is a great film about bar culture, projecting an unflinching sensitivity to the lost souls populating these spaces, trying to get their desires and needs met whilst not quite knowing how, as they focus on tangible social objectives to deter cognizance from their nebulous existential woes. Rarely have I seen a film so perceptive, granting value to the distractions and the big picture at once, and then looking past a condescending view of distractions to see intricate detail in behavior and nonverbal dispositions, that reveal worlds of emotion and identity conflict that words cannot do justice. And then there are collective experiences of pure sublime, impermanent yet wholeheartedly meaningful. My favorite instance is the coin on the bottle moment, which could have been shot in a manner that conveyed triviality or emptiness when contrasted with what it's drawing attention from, but here is unconditionally pulsating with value for these two souls joined in harmony for just a brief, transient exchange.

The existentialism veers both ways, towards intrinsically subjective merit and vacuous deserts of displacement- and then of course, these wonderful bits of affinity pivot to intrusive divergences- propositions to get drunk instead of meditating a little longer on that intimacy. Such intuitive responses crush the possibility of depth out of fear, out of a need for palpable action, to ironically use one's agency to achieve a feeling when that feeling is being covered up by the action. Sounds a lot like alcoholism, like bar culture, like the self-medication hypothesis of avoiding dysphoria with compulsions while believing ignorantly that this will fix the issue and produce a result that we can control but that we truly fear; hence the impulse to enact the unconsciously-antithetical behavior change to begin with. Here it's applied beyond addiction into social anxiety and alienation, and the setting is a brilliant milieu to set such an exploration, and, ultimately, inert rumination- which is exactly what we are observing the alcohol and distractions cover up. Self-reflexively, the filmmaker does for the characters what they cannot do for themselves, and by proxy us- who can look in the mirror and relate if we so choose. It's somehow both raw and gentle, brutally real and respectfully humanistic.

Does anyone know what’s happened to this release? I’ve been checking anywhere to order it for roughly a year and it seems that no one has it in stock, it doesn’t even show up on Second Run’s shop anymore. Did this go quietly OOP or is it just Out of Stock at the moment?