Mostra Internazionale d Arte Cinematografica Venice

I started loving Costa Gavras films very early, then I distributed for Sony "Music Box" which won in Berlin and met the director working closely with him and his wife (the producer of all his films).

Such a smart creative mind, I cannot wait to see his last film!

Bruno Chatelin

Costa-Gavras (Z, Missing, Music Box) will receive the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker 2019 award of the 76th Venice International Film Festival (28 August - 7 September 2019), dedicated to a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to innovation in contemporary cinema.

The award ceremony for Costa-Gavras will take place on Saturday August 31st 2019 in the Sala Grande(Palazzo del Cinema) at 10 pm, before the world premiere screening Out of Competition of the new film he wrote and directed, Adults in the Room (France, Greece, 124') with Christos Loulis, Alexandros Bourdoumis, Ulrich Tukur.

With regards to this acknowledgment, the Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera has stated: “There are many reasons why Costa-Gavras deserves to be counted among today’s great directors, but there is one reason in particular. He is able to turn politics into a fascinating topic, a subject like any other, not just for the initiated and already convinced few, but as well for the greater public, using every means at cinema’s disposal in order to touch the greatest number of spectators possible. This director, reserved yet determined, has always held that all movies are political. This not only enables him to dodge the label of political director, which has always been attached to him – often in a polemical and reductive manner – but also to claim a peaceful and sincerely democratic faith in a type of mainstream cinema that makes the viewer reflect and question, and also sparks deep emotions. Thanks to the intrinsic, authentic indignation of his movies, to the deep humanism that characterizes them, and to the freedom they demand, Costa-Gavras calls into question our weaknesses and our submissiveness. It has been said that, “if we have fallen asleep, his cinema wakes us up. And if we have lost hope, his films restore it to us.”

Behind closed doors, a human tragedy plays out. A universal theme: a story of people trapped in an inhuman network of power. The brutal circle of the Eurogroup meetings, who impose on Greece the dictatorship of austerity, where humanity and compassion are utterly disregarded. A claustrophobic trap with no way out, exerting pressures on the protagonists which finally divide them. A tragedy in the Ancient Greek sense: the characters are not good or evil, but driven by the consequences of their own conception of what it is right to do. A tragedy for our very modern time.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

You never forget the country of your birth, especially when it is a country like Greece. I fled my country because, back then, all it offered to young people of my social class was a life of submission to a theocratic-democracy. As an immigrant, France allowed me to surpass my wildest dreams. My ‘Greekness’ took hold of me again when the Colonels seized power. The expression of my personal resistance was Z. Ten years ago, the Greek crisis plunged the country back into the same situation that made me flee in the first place. And this, of course, made me want to express my revolt once again, with Adults in the Room.