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Madrid — Spanish writer-director José Luis Cuerda, a masterful modern practitioner of Spain’s central comedic tradition, died Feb. 4 in Madrid from a stroke. He was 72.

He will also be remembered for discovering Alejandro Amenábar, especially producing his first feature, “Thesis.”

Born in Albacete, central Spain, but moving to Madrid, Cuerda made his feature debut in 1982 with relationship dramedy “Pares y nones.” It was with his second film, 1987’s “The Enchanted Forest,” however, that Cuerda really found his own voice and a place in Spain’s central comedic film tradition, working with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, Luis Berlanga’s regular scribe, and adapting a novel of a writer, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, who had been brought to the big screen before by two Spanish comedic giants: Edgar Neville and Fernando Fernán Gómez.

Azcona’s humor mixed acidity, the episodic structure of Spanish sainete theater sketches and the social critique of Italian neorealism. Cuerda took this and,...

One of the most alluring aspects of the Morelia Film Festival is its diverse programming: not just promoting new Mexican and Michoacan filmmaking, and sampling the best of new worldwide films, those destined for both the arthouse and commercial venues, but creating a new generation of cinephiles, as well as pleasing those already converted, with its rediscoveries of the past.  Luckily on day one I stumbled into an astonishing 1952 flamenco documentary by the cineaste audit Edgar Neville, which festival director Daniela Michel told me was due to their relationship with the Filmoteca Espanola, source of her major rediscovery of last year, Manuel Mur Oti. But the tribute to Neville, as fascinating as he sounds in the catalogue essay (friend of Chaplin, supervisor of Hispanic versions of early American sound films, director of twenty films in Franco's Spain), only includes one other film, "Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks," in an unsubtitled print.