Whew, this is the 11th review I'm working on today! ;-) And a quite important one at that; Vojtěch Jasný's "All My Good Countrymen" is one of the milestones of Czech cinema of the 60's. Its local DVD premiere was first announced in 2004, but it took 3 more years for the disc to finally appear. The reason - as claimed by Zóna (Czech only) - was simple enough; there was no source to create the DVD from, because a usable - in terms of picture quality - master did not exist, nor did a film print a new master could have been created from (even the film's negative stored in the National Film Archive is damaged). A solution presented itself in 2007, when a reasonably preserved copy resurfaced in Germany.

So, how does it fare? Well, I'm not sure myself... A year ago or so, I managed to record "Countrymen" off CSFilm - a satellite channel specialized in Czechoslovak classics, unfortunately, their broadcast quality is - mainly due to an inadequately low bitrate - frankly disgusting. :-( Still, I decided to use that recording for comparison purposes, and the results are quite surprising! Allowing for the DVD's high bitrate, the level of detail is - obviously - superior to that of the broadcast, however, the colours - supposedly the greatest problem of the surviving film prints - seem to come off quite well in CSFilm's master (which, I assume, is based on a local "damaged" print). Of course, there are exceptions - mostly in the 2nd half of the film (see e.g. the blue curtain in frames 76788 / 76779, or the red background in frames 147484 / 147483). When it comes to imperfections, the broadcast constantly displays the so called "tram lines," but it's miraculously - albeit not completely - free of little blemishes like specks of dust, spots and whatnot, which the DVD suffers from in abundance...

Also available in a Special Edition, accompanied by a book:



Can't really think of anything to say here... If I was a professional reviewer, I'd talk about "acute/apparent absence of artefacts, bespoke blacks, competent contrast, distinct deficit of DVNR, and - last but not least - elliptical/elusive/no/non-existent evidence of edge-enhancement," but I just work here... No, I tell a lie - I don't even work here, so nothing prevents me from saying that I was quite surprised by the more-dark-greyish-than-black blacks (graded like that to match the look of a contemporary distribution film print, perhaps? NFA did stipulate something on those lines in the conditions of the tenders for their previous two restorations - Marketa Lazarová and The Firemen's Ball), but the rest of the epithets wouldn't come amiss here.
     What mars the overall positive impression are the signs of hasty / sloppy work and lack of QA; for example, on my Oppo set to Region A, the region mismatch screen appears, but the disc jolly well loads anyway:

And the restoration demo, which contains all of like 10 short lines of text, sports this really glaring typo (it should read "POŠKOZENÉ FILMOVÉ POLÍČKO"):