Jirí Menzel, the director of the Oscar-winning 'Rigorously guarded trains' dies

Jirí Menzel

, the Czech film director who died on Saturday at the age of 82, was about to return to our billboard.

But not as a filmmaker, but as a co-star of

, an unusual film directed by Martin Sulik about the ravages of Nazi extermination in the former Czechoslovakia.

The film connects with and closes the circle opened by

, his debut as a filmmaker that, in 1966, also dealt with the Nazi occupation with such a fresh and original approach that, after passing through the Cannes Film Festival, it won the

for Best Foreign Language Film.

That two years before the

more sadly put the focus on his colleagues in the Czech New Wave, the moment of greatest creative effervescence in the cinema of their country.

In

, Menzel plays a man whose parents were victims of the

.

Reading a book, he discovers the SS who was responsible for the massacre, and goes in search of him.

But in his place is his son, played by an endearing Peter Simonischek, the humorous father of

(2016), one of the best German comedies in memory.

In addition to its curious approach, which leads to a journey hand in hand between the son of the victims and that of the executioner, the film also has touches of comedy, such as the irresistible comedy that was

.

Based on a then still unfinished novel by Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Seix Barral), that film shot in dazzling black and white was the story of a timid apprentice stationmaster who is tasked with supervising those trains of "great strategic value. "for a Third Reich already in full collapse.

In the microcosm of the station, there are elements of resistance, towards which the protagonist will bend to try to conquer the girl, and demonstrate his more than questioned manhood.

Long before the no less Oscar-winning

(1997), this

, which introduced laughter into a thorny subject

, went down in history

.

Menzel, who was also a prolific actor, always made films with the intention of reaching the whole world, and expressed his anger against intellectual solipsism.

Prague spring

Soviet tanks entered Prague, and many filmmakers, such as Milos Forman or Ivan Passer, decided to go into exile.

But

.

, a film that ended in 1969, could not be released until the fall of the communist regime, winning the

in 1990. It was also a comedy on a serious subject, nothing less than a rehabilitation camp for "bourgeois elements" in the early years of Czech communism.

Menzel always stood up to totalitarianism with a smile, a sign of intelligence.

In spite of everything, Menzel continued to develop his eventful and long-standing career, always starting from other people's texts,

, which he took away, in uncool statements to this newspaper when the Spanish Film Library, and the Catalan , they dedicated a complete retrospective to him to celebrate the half century of rigorously guarded trains: "I will not defend censorship. But you work better within limits. When state control ended and everyone could do what they wanted, it quickly became clear that there was not so much repressed genius. Many fools were exposed. "

Among the twenty feature films that he directed,

(1968),

(1969),

(1985) and

(2006), which marked his sixth collaboration with Hrabal, this time to provide a historical fresco that, unlike the

railway

, featured an upstart with great vigilance skills.

During the past confinement,

recommended

as part of the cycle programmed by the Spanish Film Library, in collaboration with Filmin, to relieve viewers trapped in their homes.

Without a doubt the best medicine.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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