Paris (AFP)
In "Adults in the room", the filmmaker Costa-Gavras, champion of a committed cinema, plunges backstage of the crisis of the Greek debt to better show the functioning and the errors according to him of the European Union.
Screened out of competition at the last Venice Film Festival, "Adults in the room", theatrical Wednesday, is the adaptation of the book "Conversations between adults, behind the scenes of Europe", the former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis, remained a little less than six months in office in 2015.
The film, like the book, tells the tussle of the former Greek Finance Minister, elected the same year under the banner of Alexis Tsipras's party, Syriza, with the creditors, European Union and International Monetary Fund, in the hope of easing strict austerity policies.
The idea of this feature began to germinate in the head of the Franco-Greek director of "Z" in 2007, during a meeting with the ambassador of Cyprus in Paris, he had explained in Venice in September.
"I asked him:" How is Greece doing? "He said to me:" Greece is going to disaster. "And why?" He explained exactly what would happen in the years to come, "he said. said.
"I started from that moment to gather the material, everywhere", before his wife sent him in 2015 an interview with Yanis Varoufakis, which he then decided to meet, had continued the filmmaker of 86 years old.
"He showed me the writings of his speeches, he made me hear the things he had recorded at Eurogroup meetings", the group of finance ministers of the euro area, he said . "Varoufakis also told me that he intended to write a book, and he told me the idea of the book, and sent it to me chapter by chapter, and when I finished reading, I say + there, there is the film + ".
This political drama of two hours follows the character of Yanis Varoufakis (Christos Loulis), through the meanders of the crisis.
It is seen from meetings of finance ministers to European summits and informal talks, from capital to capital, battling against his European counterparts, and in particular the German minister Wolfgang Schäuble (Ulrich Tukur).
Costa-Gavras had explained to Venice to have wanted to "show" with this film, even if he sometimes struggles to make entertaining his subject for the least austere, and to make all the complexity. "I want to show," he told AFP, pointing out that his film faced two ideas of politics: "do we want to make a neo-liberal Europe or a Europe of people?" .
© 2019 AFP