British label Second Run has announced that it is preparing a Blu-ray release of Pavel Jurácek's film
A Case for a Rookie Hangman (1969). The release is expected to arrive on the market later this year.
Synopsis: A free-form and darkly surreal adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Pavel Juráček's film also channels Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka to create one of Czecholsovak cinema's most unique and deeply disturbing works.
A man becomes lost on a country road and finds himself in an alternative, nightmare world that mirrors (then) modern-day Czechoslovakia. Needless to say the film was not warmly recieved by the authorities, and like his earlier surrealist masterwork Josef Kilián (1963), was promptly 'banned forever'.
Juráček, who had earlier co-written Věra Chytilová's Daisies, Jindřich Polák's pioneering Ikarie XB 1 and Karel Zeman's A Jester's Tale, never made another film - but his legacy is one of the most profound, invigrating and important in all Czech cinema.