Closely Watched Trains/The Shop on Main Street

These two Czechoslovakian films, Oscar winners for best foreign film in 1966 and 1965, respectively, exemplified what, at the time, was Eastern Europe’s most vital film industry. Both are humanist, pacifist works set during World War II. Jiri Menzel’s quirkier, more unclassifiable “Trains” is a wistful tragicomedy on the tangled love life of an assistant train dispatcher. Janos Kadar’s “Shop” boasts a superb performance by Ida Kaminska (above, with Josef Kroner) as the old woman forced to cede her button shop to a clumsy non-Jewish outsider. (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.)