FROM OVER HERE TO OVER THERE: VIDEO

The most eagerly awaited video release by an Eastern-bloc director now is Yugoslavian Rajko Grlic's That Summer of White Roses, due from Media Home Video Entertainment in July. It won the Grand Prize at last year's Tokyo Film Festival and will be screened theatrically at the San Francisco Film Festival in May. Tom Conti stars as a lifeguard who saves a Nazi (Rod Steiger) during World War II and earns the townspeople's wrath. But most of the current Eastern-bloc video imports of note are from the Soviet Union. The International Film Exchange (IFEX), the New York film and video distributor that brought Little Vera to the U.S., offers a range of Soviet (and many other foreign) titles: Oblomov, the film of Ivan Goncharov's wonderful novel about Russia's most famous couch potato; Scarecrow, Rolan Bykov's study of children's cruelty to one another (the most popular Soviet movie of 1985); and Karen Shakhnazarov's Jazzman, a fictional history of an art form suppressed by officials who felt improvisation had no place in the land of the Five-Year Plan. Many video stores also stock something intriguing from other bloc filmmakers: Look for Jiri Menzel's Oscar-winner Closely Watched Trains, a droll comedy about lust and idleness at a World War II Czech train station, and Krzysztof Zanussi's A Year of the Quiet Sun.