Costa-Gavras

Loutra Iraias, Grecia (1933). Konstantinos Gavras, known as Costa-Gavras, is a film director born in Greece and settled in France since early 1950s. He develops a critical and socio-political cinema. Even though his early career was focused on political thriller and sentimental drama, he has made social fiction cinema lately. Missing shows the complicity between the US Government and the Pinochet’s military coup; State of Siege denounces the connivance of the CIA with the civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay (1973 – 1985). The confession approaches openly the tortures during the Stalinism and he reported the good relationship between the Holy See and Hitler in his film Amen. Arcadia and Le Capital reveal the anguish of unemployed people and the voracity of the banking. These are a few titles in his long career, that left no one indifferent. In the words of the critic Diego Galán, “his cinema composes a political chronicle of the main events of the second half of the past century…which still keeps reflecting the present”.