Cinema
The Sun in a Net
Slnko v sieti
Štefan Uher · 1962
Synopsis
In Bratislava, the schoolgirl Bela Blažejová and Oldrich Fajták, known as Fajolo, a fifteen-year-old couple of uncertain footing, meet on rooftops bristling with antennas and hurt each other with words, on the day of a solar eclipse. When summer comes, Fajolo leaves for a voluntary work camp on a farm, in reality imposed on him, and each of them forms new relationships. Bela lives in a tense household, between a blind mother whose blindness is never mentioned, an unfaithful father and a grandfather at odds with the family.
Context
Bednár drew the screenplay from three of his short stories, and the adaptation was approved on 9 April 1962; Stanislav Barabáš having refused it, Albert Marenčin entrusted it to Uher, who tightened it. The film contrasts Bratislava, its trams and its rooftops, with the countryside of Meleňany. Shown in 1963 at the Czechoslovak film festival in Ústí nad Labem and released on 15 February, it received the Czechoslovak critics' prize for the best film of 1962. Bela's distant parents, her father's infidelities and the poorly run collective farm where Fajolo is sent earned the film the distrust of the censors, who expected socialist realism.
Who it is for
An hour and a half in black and white, in Slovak; a film made of scenes set side by side rather than explained.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the starting point of the Czechoslovak New Wave; a Slovak film prize bears his name.