Costa-Gavras’s cinema narrates his century, the century that separates us from the rise of Nazism in Europe, and which leads to the uncertainty of today’s world: fragile democracies, environmental disasters, social injustice, and popular impatience. This documentary series created by Edwy Plenel does not only (re)visit the work of a world-renowned filmmaker. It also surveys the history of the last century and the beginning of our own. Its narrative thread is the story of popular cinema, which has encouraged political awareness as a common good, a moral challenge, an individual responsibility.
Costa-Gavras’s cinema prevents us from becoming insensitive, indifferent, indolent. How do we cope? What does it mean to resist? And how do we resist without becoming the executioner ourselves? What is justice? Freedom? Responsibility? How do we avoid becoming indifferent, resigning ourselves to evil, being dazzled by new faces? How to stay concerned with the ways of the world and the fate of others? How to keep the ability to say no: to injustice, lies, hate, and fear.
Episode 1 is dedicated to the film Z released in 1969: a film about the assassination of the democratic opposition leader Grigóris Lambrákis, which foreshadowed the Greek colonels’ coup d’état of 1967. Episode 3 traces the history of The Confession released in 1970: the first audience-oriented film to confront the issue of Stalinist trials, paving the way for the moral crisis of communism.