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Has the Frantisek Vlacil box gone out of print? I had it included in a pre-order at Amazon, and they informed me that the item was no longer available.

Hi,
It's just out of stock - not out of print. There will be more stock arriving within the next 10 days.
Thanks for your patience.

Screening at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, MD on May 14 and 15 (Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening).

Great film, rich with ambiguities. The suspicion that Adelheid might speak more Czech than she lets on (a suspicion seemingly proven wrong at the end); the uncertainty around how much she aligned with her father's fascism; doubts about whether the police chief is of good or bad character.

The cinematography and editing are beautiful -- there are some really nice juxtaposing cuts. And the musical score is very well done -- I think limiting the music to one or two composers is generally a good idea, as in the all Mozart score of Varda's Le Bonheur. Perhaps the choice of Bach and Strauss, with the absence of any Czech music, is significant; at any rate the two complement each other well.

Does anyone know when this film premiered? I had it down as a 1970 film, but IMDb has been edited to list a premiere year (with no exact date) of 1969 in Prague.

For what it's worth, Second Run calls it a 1969 film.

Peter Hames in The Czechoslovak New Wave has this down as 1969. I'd go with that.

Completed in 1969, premiered on 6 April 1970. So either year is valid depending on how you calculate these things.

That said, given that films by controversial directors often had to wait a fair bit before getting shown, I'd be more inclined to favour the completion year - after all, we wouldn't call Larks on a String a 1990 film, even though that was when it received its world premiere some 21 years late.

Just to clarify, I was looking for year of first showing, i.e. IMDb year. Interesting that IMDb has been edited to list the film being shown in Prague in 1969. Frustrating that there is no source. I've submitted a correction.

6 April 1970 is the start of the commercial cinema release, but of course there may have been festival screenings prior to then - but I don't know of any.

But absolutely every Czech source that I'm aware of states 1969, and my instinct is to go with them rather than the frequently and notoriously unreliable IMDB.

(I once fired someone - or, to be more precise, didn't use his services again - after I'd told him upfront not to use the IMDB without cross-checking everything with a more authoritative source, and then caught him out making a couple of unarguably IMDB-sourced factual mistakes.)

All the online sources I find list 6 April 1970 as the premiere date - whether Czech-language sources or otherwise.

Can you provide anything to the contrary as I cannot find anything? 1969 is when the film was produced but was it shown in that year?

Adelheid received the award Pečeť města Chebu in 1969 according to the NFA.

For anyone who doesn't own the boxset, Adelheid is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.