Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

Discuss internationally-released DVDs and Blu-rays or other international DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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TMDaines
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 pm
Location: Stretford, Manchester

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#51 Post by TMDaines » Tue Jul 05, 2016 2:09 am

Yes, TransferWise is a great way of doing international bank transfers.

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chatterjees
Joined: Tue Apr 02, 2013 6:08 pm
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Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#52 Post by chatterjees » Mon Jul 18, 2016 12:41 pm

So, anybody received their order from them yet? It's been long, and I never even received a dispatch email after the money was sent. And, the guy named Pavol, who originally sent the email out with the bank information, doesn't even reply to my emails anymore. So, I am just wondering whether the other members, who have sent money to this seller, had got any sort of emails regarding the order. Thanks in advance.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#53 Post by feihong » Mon Jul 18, 2016 1:11 pm

Hadn't heard anything yet, either. I sent them an e-mail just now, enquiring whether the order had dispatched. I copied the klapka@klapka.sk address as well. We'll see if that works.

djvaso
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 6:00 am
Location: Serbia&Montenegro

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#54 Post by djvaso » Mon Jul 18, 2016 4:31 pm

I think that I had sent an e-mail to the same guy last year. I received an automatic replay that he was out of office and then another mail that my e-mail was not read and went to a bin. :oops:
Now, Mrs. Nôtová from SFU has forwarded my request about alternative payment to the manager of Klapka store but there is still no replay.

feketekino
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:30 am

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#55 Post by feketekino » Mon Jul 18, 2016 5:50 pm

My personal experience in the past was I only received an email with the invoice and bank routing information and never got a notification on shipment. I would just receive a package about three weeks later in the States. This time around I used transferwise as suggested by other users, and sent Pavol an email letting him know that transferwise reported the transfer was completed and he wrote me back to confirm that it had completed and he would ship the package that day.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#56 Post by feihong » Tue Jul 19, 2016 2:04 pm

I got a reply back from Pavol. He gave me a tracking number, and I could see from it that my order was in Jersey City, on its way to Los Angeles.

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chatterjees
Joined: Tue Apr 02, 2013 6:08 pm
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Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#57 Post by chatterjees » Tue Jul 19, 2016 4:17 pm

Well, I finally got a reply from Pavol and although the reasoning seems weird, it played out well for me -
We are really sorry. There's chaos in order because we have identical payment from several customers from the US. We found your payment only a moment ago. We are going to expend your order today.

We apologize.
Team Klapka.sk

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#58 Post by feihong » Tue Jul 19, 2016 5:02 pm

I think they aren't set up to handle this kind of order in the volume they got them. Probably they don't have a lot of employees to sort this out.

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L.A.
Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 7:33 am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#59 Post by L.A. » Wed Jul 20, 2016 2:13 pm


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ermylaw
Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2013 10:58 am

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#60 Post by ermylaw » Fri Jul 22, 2016 2:44 pm

I hope that those of you who have this on order will let us know when you get this set in. I'm tempted to order it, but I'm going to wait until one of you receives it.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#61 Post by feihong » Fri Jul 22, 2016 2:49 pm

According to USPS, my box is still in Jersey City. I'll post when it finally arrives.

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chatterjees
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Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#62 Post by chatterjees » Fri Jul 22, 2016 3:14 pm

feihong wrote:According to USPS, my box is still in Jersey City. I'll post when it finally arrives.
How are you tracking it? So, you received an email from Pavol with a tracking number?

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vertovfan
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 7:46 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#63 Post by vertovfan » Fri Jul 22, 2016 3:37 pm

They attempted delivery of mine today. If all goes well, I'll pick it up at the post office tomorrow.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#64 Post by feihong » Fri Jul 22, 2016 4:45 pm

chatterjees wrote:
feihong wrote:According to USPS, my box is still in Jersey City. I'll post when it finally arrives.
How are you tracking it? So, you received an email from Pavol with a tracking number?
Yeah, he sent me something that had a screenshot of a tracking #.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#65 Post by feihong » Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:04 pm

My box arrived today. The outer box was beaten all to hell, but everything inside was just fine. The box the films come in is sturdy, and pretty large. Each disc gets a full European–size bluray case. The art is almost completely anonymous, with a gridded text layout. It seems inspired by the Scorcese Polish box, but a little more functionally designed and less conceptually uniform. The box was shrink-wrapped, and then each bluray case inside was individually shrink–wrapped, as well.

As for the discs, I haven't watched any all the way through yet, but I looked through the chapters of each disc.

Holy cow. I hardly have the words for it. The discs look amazing. They might not be the most perfectly authored discs available, but they do everything right, and watching the images is a pleasure. Unlike the Polish set, which is full of frustrating DNR, you can really see the grain in these movies. They are not uniform in picture quality: A Path Across the Danube seems to have a little bit murkier picture quality than the others, though it may relate as much to how it was shot as anything else. The Sun In a Net and Birds, Orphans & Fools are both rapturously good to look at. Birds, Orphans is just bursting with color, with thicker grain than most of the films. The Sun In a Net has lovely contrast and depth. The Boxer and Death looks really good. I haven't seen that film before, so I don't have any great comparison to make, but the visuals look quite sharp. There are a lot of deep–focus–looking shots in what I saw of the movie, and those were handled immaculately. I Love, You Love is another I haven't seen. The imagery looks ravishing, and the picture quality is stellar.

My audio setup is not amazing, and I'm not a fine judge of audio mixing, but in each film the sound seemed to leap through the speakers with a lot of depth and clarity. I thought this was a big improvement over the audio on the older SME DVDs.

The menus first offer a choice of Slovakian or English. If you choose English, the film menu that appears is in English. This is just like the old SME discs, but unlike on those discs, you don't have to sit through amazing crawls of really long company logos which you can't fast-forward or skip before you get to the menu. The menus don't have selectable chapter stops, but the discs do have chapters, and you can skip through them. In addition to Slovakian and English subtitles, all the discs have French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian subtitles.

All in all this has been a first-rate package, and one which really caters to the export market as well as film fans in Slovakia. I don't know any of the films in the second boxset, but when that one is available, I'll be ordering it as well, if only to support the project. I hope this will lead to a few more such releases, and the possibility that we might see the Elo Havetta movies on blu ray (Celebration in the Botanical Garden and Wild Lillies), which are, to me, close to the apex of cinema. Some of the other gems I've encountered in the SME collection, which I hope make it to bluray would include And I'll Run to the Ends of the Earth, Pink Dreams, Sweet Troubles, Build a House Plant a Tree, Night Riders, and If I Had a Gun. As it is, Birds, Orphans & Fools is one of my favorite films, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the others that are released next, as well as the rest of this package.

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TMDaines
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 pm
Location: Stretford, Manchester

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#66 Post by TMDaines » Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:13 am

When you say the "outer box was beaten all to hell", do you mean the packaging or the boxset?

admira
Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2009 4:33 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#67 Post by admira » Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:25 pm

http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/shop/index. ... uct_id=726" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#68 Post by feihong » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:15 pm

TMDaines wrote:When you say the "outer box was beaten all to hell", do you mean the packaging or the boxset?


Just the shipping package. It looked like it had been through hell. The contents were fine.


djvaso
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 6:00 am
Location: Serbia&Montenegro

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#70 Post by djvaso » Tue Aug 02, 2016 3:04 pm

I have managed to pay at klapka.sk with TransferWise service but it is not easy. At first system refused to accept my Visa debit card because British pound is not its currency. Then I have to activate my dormant virtual Visa card used ages ago when PayPal was not available in these Hills and have paid with it.
UPDATE
This is really an embarrassment, they sent me DVD instead of Blu-ray! :shock:
I check again Klapka.sk and there are four listings for Signum laudis: 1) Blu-ray for EUR 6.90, 2) DVD for EUR 4.00, 3) OOP DVD and 4) sales. I did not make mistake.

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chatterjees
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Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#71 Post by chatterjees » Wed Sep 28, 2016 1:36 am

Any news on the second set yet?

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#72 Post by feihong » Fri Nov 04, 2016 9:13 pm

I'm bumping this, in case anyone has news. The first set was phenomenal enough that even though I haven't seen any of the films listed for the second box, I have no doubt the box will be worth it.

g053584398
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 3:35 pm

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#73 Post by g053584398 » Wed Nov 23, 2016 3:46 pm

As a result of reading some of the helpful posts on this forum, and in particular the recommendation of TransferWise, I finally took the plunge a couple of days ago and ordered 46 DVDs from the SFI. Needless to say I'm looking forward to receiving my package and exploring the films.

djvaso
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 6:00 am
Location: Serbia&Montenegro

Re: Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#74 Post by djvaso » Sat Jan 07, 2017 6:07 pm

Perinbaba (The Feather Fairy) (1985)
http://www.klapka.sk/sk/produkty/blu-ra ... u-ray.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Fontána pre Zuzanu (A Fountain for Susan) (1985)
http://www.klapka.sk/sk/produkty/blu-ra ... u-ray.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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MichaelB
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Slovak Cinema DVD/Blu-ray

#75 Post by MichaelB » Thu Jan 12, 2017 9:55 am

I've just watched the whole of The Boxer and Death and enthusiastically endorse the comments made above - there's really nothing wrong with the presentation at all on any level, with even the subtitles being idiomatic enough to suggest a native English speaker may have been involved. And both the source and transfer are flat-out superb, with only very minor age-related contrast fluctuations to remind us that this is a 54-year-old film. (Outstanding film, too - it's certainly one of the more distinguished Central European films about the Holocaust, and I suspect it's primarily its nationality that's made it so undeservedly obscure: had it been in Czech and released five years later I imagine it would have fared very differently.)

One thing that feihong doesn't mention is that each film comes with a fully bilingual booklet (the SFI DVD equivalents were Slovak-only) offering a brief context-setting essay on the film and biographies of key cast/crew members. And each disc has its own barcode, which suggests that a separate release may well be on the cards.

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