Keeping tabs on current developments in the cinema of the Czech Republic, BAMcinématek kicks off a five-day run of the nation’s recent films by circling back to the Czech new wave of the 1960s. Perhaps this is a synergistic nod to Tom Stoppard’s new production, “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” which revisits Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution. Or maybe it’s just good timing that pioneering Czech director Jirí Menzel has made his first new feature in a dozen years.

Mr. Menzel, 69, belonged to a generation of artists invested in subverting the Eastern bloc status quo with black humor, sexual candor, and ethical dissections of Czech mass psychology in the shadow of Communist bureaucracy and doublespeak. Unlike such colleagues as Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, Mr. Menzel did not immigrate to Hollywood after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. But his films — notably “Closely Watched Trains” (1967) and “Larks on a String” (1969, released 1990) — became touchstones for a movement.

He returns with “I Served the King of England” (2006), which opens BAM’s New Czech Films program tonight. The comedy is the nostalgic reverie of a grizzled jailbird named Jan Dite (Oldrich Kaiser) who has been released from prison after nearly 15 years. He finds himself fixing an abandoned shack in a wooded region near the northern Czech border. While cleaning up, he happens on an old pint glass and flashes back to his youth as a waiter in a pub, sometime in the 1930s. The young Jan (Ivan Barnev) is an impish soul who delights in tossing his spare change in the air, then watching from a corner as people crawl on their hands and knees to collect it.

One day, a prosperous salesman comes into the pub and teaches Jan the meaning of money. Thus young Jan acquires ambition, though it’s a curious kind: The only thing he ever wants to spend money on is the fetching of girls — whose nude bodies he garlands in flower petals — at a neighboring brothel. Half the film has a sad, poetic quality — the penitent older man, reflecting on his life’s pleasures, sharing a campfire with a frisky young woman who has been dispatched to this same outpost — and half has a honeyed, shaggy-dog feel.

The story shifts into the darkly absurd when Jan falls in love with a German girl on the eve of World War II, and she begins to convert him to Hitler worship. Mr. Barnev plays Jan as a harmless dupe swept up in the sour breeze of history. Even as everyone else is shipped off to concentration camps, he is deemed genetically fit to procreate with a daughter of the Reich. Eventually, he becomes a servant at a luxury hotel whose occupants are carefree nymphs chosen to receive certified Aryan seed in a bid to create the master race. In a resonant stroke, Mr. Menzel signals a reversal of fortunes when the naked romping blonds change overnight into German soldiers who have lost their limbs.

Mr. Menzel, who will appear for a question-and-answer session after tonight’s 7 p.m. screening, offers an ironic social parable that feels very Old World. Many of the other selections in BAM’s series, which runs through Sunday, aspire to a documentary edginess that examines contemporary Czech society from its margins.

Robert Sedlácek’s “Rules of Lies” (2006) adapts the director’s documentary about a group of addicts at a therapy camp into a gritty feature. “Dolls” (2007), the debut film of director Karin Babinská, is a naturalistic drama about three teenage girls on a hitchhiking adventure, flirting with trouble (lots of it) as each sorts out her own sense of self. If the terrain is familiar, the performances by a young, seemingly nonprofessional cast are appealing. “Pleasant Moments” (2006), directed by Mr. Menzel’s Czech new-wave peer, Vera Chytilová, continues in a therapeutic vein, charting the conflicts of a female psychologist as viewed through a handheld lens.

Who knows what prompts so much sociocultural analysis, but it makes for an emotional intensity on which the actors thrive. Perhaps the Westernization of Eastern Europe has finally given Czechs the freedom to be as neurotic as the rest of us.

Through November 18 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).