Konstantinos "Kostas" Gavras (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος "Κώστας" Γαβράς; born 12 February 1933), known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France.
His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.
[4] Costa-Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay.
L'Aveu (The Confession, 1970) follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský 'show trial' in 1952.
In a plot loosely based on the case of US police official and alleged torture expert Dan Mitrione, an American embassy official (played by Yves Montand) is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a radical leftist urban guerilla group, which interrogates him in order to reveal the details of secret American support for repressive regimes in Latin America.
Betrayed (1988) is roughly based upon the terrorist activities of American neo-Nazi and white supremacist Robert Mathews and his group The Order.
In Music Box (1989), a respected Hungarian immigrant (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is accused of having commanded an Anti-Semitic death squad during World War II.
The film is inspired by the arrest and trial of Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' realisation that his father had been a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party.
The film plot alleges that Pope Pius XII was aware of the plight of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, but failed to take public action to publicise or condemn the Holocaust.
In most cases, the targets of Costa-Gavras's work have been right wing or far right movements and regimes, including the Greek military in Z, and right-wing dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.
In this political context, L'Aveu (The Confession) provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.
[citation needed] Costa-Gavras has brought attention to international issues, some urgent, others merely problematic, and he has done this in the tradition of cinematic story-telling.
The approach he adopted in L'Aveu also "subtly invited the audience to a critical look focused on structural issues, delving this time into the opposite Communist bloc.
[7]He also listed René Clément,[8] Jacques Demy,[8] and Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers as an influence on his filmmaking.
Wade Major of the Directors Guild of America mentioned that, "With films like Z and Missing, Costa-Gavras almost single-handedly created the modern political thriller".
"[11] He has influenced directors such as Oliver Stone, William Friedkin, Steven Soderbergh, Rachid Bouchareb, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Ben Affleck.
"[13] The American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh listed Z as an inspiration on his film Traffic and even stated that he "wanted to make it like [Costa-Gavras's] Z".
[14][15][16][17] In 2020, Costa Gavras wrote the preface to the book Opération Condor, by French writer and journalist Pablo Daniel Magee.