Prague International Film Festival jury member Antonio Giménez Rico, the amiable film director and a distinguished president of Spain's Academy of Arts and Cinematographic Sciences, belongs to a generation of liberal filmmakers - fellow-travellers include Carlos Saura, Mario Camus and Pilar Miró - who believe that Spain's triumphant transition to democracy didn't end with its first democratic general elections for more than 40 years, held in 1977.

At its best, Giménez Rico's work is a plea for tolerance, a call to remember the (often conservative) victims of change, and an attack on anachronisms still callusing Spain's body politic.

Giménez Rico attracted the attention of the public in Spain with Retrato de familia (Family Portrait, 1976), an adaptation of a novel by celebrated Spanish writer Miguel Delibes, recording the infancy, early life, love, lust and chance, but so wasteful death in the Spanish Civil War of the scion of a conservative (and Franco-supporting) family.

As with so many Spanish filmmakers, Gimenez Rico really needed the liberty which came with the official abolition of censorship in 1977 in order to battle for further liberties in Spain. Vestida de azul (Dressed in Blue, 1983) was an ebullient series of interviews with transvestites which cut through clichés.

El disputado voto del señor Cayo (The Disputed Vote of Mr Cayo, 1985), a portrait of a Spanish peasant, a relic from Spain's near medieval past, still living buried in the wilds of contemporary Spain.

And Soldadito español (Spanish Soldier, 1988) an early, and still rare, lambasting on Spanish National Service. Chic in photography - as all his major films - but sarcastic in tone, Soldadito español perhaps suggests the ideological thrust of Giménez Rico's best work: a formal democracy is not enough for a country: Spain needs a social transition too.

John Hopewell

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