Stefan Uher

Based on old slovak ballads, it tells of fiddlers who with their magic violins spread evil and destruction all over the world.

From Skritek’s film journal:
A girl is transformed into a maple tree by her impulsive and angry mother. Three poor wandering musicians come by the tree and create instruments from it. Walking around the country instead of happiness they bring death everywhere with their cursed instruments. However they cannot get rid of them, unless they bury the wooden instruments at the place of the tree. The three are anything but harmonious, each taking in their disputes various stances. In the end they are enlisted to go to war, because they hardly survive as unlucky musicians and bring the instruments back. That’s when the story takes an even more tragic turn for all.Read More »

Synopsis:
Oldrich “Fajolo” Fajták (Marián Bielik), a student who directs quasi-existentialist verbal abuse at his girlfriend Bela Blazejová (Jana Beláková), takes off to a formally volunteer summer work camp at a farm where he meets her grandfather.Read More »

A student, Oldrich “Fajolo” Fajtak, has a romantic attachment to two girls: his hometown love Bela, and Jana – a lover whom he meets during a summer job on a collective farm. One storyline of the film peels layers off Bela’s permanently tense home life marked by her blind mother’s helplessness, her father’s past break with his father who lives in the village where Fajolo is finding some consolation in the arms of his new lover Jana. As Fajolo begins to pry into Bela’s grandfather’s secrets, she, in turn, allows her new boyfriend Peťo to read and deride Fajolo’s remorseful letters from the farm. This lovers’ triangle provides the film with several oppositions: town and country, intelligentsia and worker, collective and personal truth in communist Czechoslovakia. The potential symbolism of the film appeared ominous to the Communist authorities bent on banning the film, but the nascent political thaw helped the filmmakers prevail and the release of “The Sun in a Net” became its harbinger in Czechoslovak film and culture.
Stanislav Szomolányi’s location cinematography and Ilja Zeljenka’s musique concrète score remain striking.Read More »