"Pictures of the Old World is incredible. What a find!" David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Dušan Hanák's renowned film was voted by critics as the best Slovak film of all time. Inspired by the photographs of Slovak artist Martin Martinček (1913–2004), whose pictures distilled entire lifetimes into luminous, intransient images, Hanák creates his own distinctive impressions of the artist's work, crafting a polyphony of human stories.
At odds with the Communist propaganda of the time, it resulted in the film being withdrawn from release and it remained condemned and banned for many years. However, Hanák's film is not a political, polemical or even a social-realist film. It goes far deeper to more fundamental levels of human experience - its power and beauty lies in its unique portrait of a people who seem to have been forgotten by the modern world.
Released for the first time ever in the UK, the DVD is presented fom a new HD digital tansfer with restored picture and sound - plus new HD restorations of two of Dušan Hanák's acclaimed short films Mass (Omša, 1967) and Old Shatterhand Came to Us (Prišiel k nám Old Shatterhand, 1966), and a new essay by author and academic Jonathan Owen.
Release date: February 2015
