Abstract
Costa-Gavras is one of a select band who have made political cinema into big box-office and stayed independent on the way. Films like Z, Missing and Betrayed, each of which tackled a hot political issue of their day, would, he thinks, have some difficulty getting through the US studio system today. Z (1969), a powerful indictment of the rule of the Colonels in Greece, and banned for many years in that country, is shown regularly today in memory and warning. Missing (1982), a big budget, big star movie, brought the horror of the disappeared in 1970s Latin America to a huge US audience. Betrayed (1989), a fiction built round disturbing factual material supplied by an unsuspecting FBI, was, say commentators, prophetic of the rise and rise of America's right-wing militias. At a time when mainstream political cinema is all but dead in the USA, the Greek film-maker, who is as much at home in Paris as in the studios of Paramount or Gaumont, draws the lines between propaganda, politics and the militant tendency; and points to the current political horizon
Published Version
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