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He is a regular at prestigious awards. It was on the beautiful stage of the Victoria Eugenia Theater in San Sebastián that the director Costa-Gavras came looking for his latest award, the Donostia Prize awarded by the festival for all of his work. José Luis Rebordinos, director of the festival, praised Costa-Gavras' work in contemporary society, that of a filmmaker who recounts " those whom power oppresses, those whom power makes invisible ". The humble, the excluded, the just or the losers of history as in his latest feature film " Adults in the room " on the Greek financial crisis, presented in San Sebastián.
special envoy to San Sebastián,
" Our society does not need heroes but coherent people, " says Costa-Gavras. His main character since we can not speak of heroes, in Adults in the room , his latest film released in early November in France, embodies this consistency. Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister of the left coalition government led by Alexis Tsipras, recounted his experience of power, the months during which he tried to renegotiate the Greek debt, to loosen the knot that was strangling the population for to restore economy. For this, he had to negotiate foot with his creditors, starting with the famous troika , and of course the Eurogroup.
Conversations between adults: behind the scenes of Europe , this is the book from which Costa-Gavras has developed a scenario. A return to his Greek roots for the director and the sources of the tragedy of a people. Yanis Varoufakis, " The minister who annoyed Brussels " titled Le Monde , will resign after six months for not being able to move the lines. How to tell the dramatic tension of the Brussels negotiations, to make bureaucrats in three-piece suit of the characters, to make the meetings of the Eurogroup really breathless? " Fiction is the best way to tell the truth, " says Costa Gavras. Between Greek tragedy (the ancient choir, the pythia, the columns of the temple of finance where the hero is lost), film noir and cruel tale, the story is in a permanent tension, served by a gallery of characters brushed by sharp dialogues where humor and cynicism mix.
The cinema of Costa Gavras is a cinema " precise " said still José Luis Rebordinos. Effective. An efficiency that made the director one of the flags of political cinema.
A very political track record
" It's the meaning of the facts that interests me, not the anecdotes, " writes Costa-Gavras. Disassemble the mechanisms of power - political, economic or both - and show how they trap individuals. From the repression of the military regime in Greece ( Z , Oscar of the best foreigner in 1970), the support of the United States to the coup of Augusto Pinochet in Chile ( Missing , Cannes Palme d'Or in 1981) to criminals of Nazi war refugees in the United States ( The music box , Golden Bear in Berlin in 1990), in his long and rich filmography, Costa-Gavras told us the twentieth century and its wanderings, from whatever side they come . And the solicitations to denounce the injustices are not lacking, the invitations of the parties present at its press conference testify to it.
" We will not close our mouths to please those we do not like, " said Yves Montand. This sentence, Costa-Gavras quotes in his autobiography , Go where it is impossible to go (2018), and the fact: all the iniquities are to denounce, whatever their alleged political edge. It is a guarantee of consistency put forward by the director. In his autobiography always, Costa-Gavras, speaking of the book-testimony of Yanis Varoufakis, writes " " Adults in the room "tells lived situations ... with a subjectivity constantly concerned with ethics ". Coherence, assumed subjectivity, ethics ... and all this in the service of a cinema of resistance of which Costa-Gavras is indeed one of the leaders.
► the festival site of San Sebastián
Adults in The Room from FNCF on Vimeo.