Filmmaker Costa-Gavras, best known for Z, to be honoured with Donostia Award at 2019 San Sebastian Film Festival

Filmmaker Costa-Gavras, one of the pioneers of the political and social protest cinema, will be honoured by the 67th San Sebastian Film Festival with its second Donostia Award. The Greek-born France-based director is best known for his film like Z, Missing and Capital. According to a press release posted on the festival’s website, the filmmaker will receive the award on 21 September at a gala in the Victoria Eugenia Theatre.

The theatre is also the venue for the special screening of Gavras’ latest feature film, Adults in the Room, adaptation of the memories of the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis. Born in 1933 in Loutra-Iraias (Greece) as Konstantinos Gavras, the director left his home country at the age of 22 to settle in Paris and study Literature at the Sorbonne. After graduating from Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC), Gavras worked as an assistant director with eminent French filmmakers such as Rene Clair, Rene Clement, Henri Verneuil, Jacques Demy, Marcel Ophuls, Jean Giono and Jean Becker. He made his feature directorial debut with 1965’s Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders). Gavras’ breakthrough came with 1967’s Z, a political drama about the murder of a left-wing deputy. The film won the Special Jury Prize and the best actor award for Jean-Louis Trintignant at the Cannes Festival, as well as an Academy Award for best foreign language film and another for best editing. For over a decade the director gave some great films to the French cinema including L’aveu (The Confession), Etat de siege(State of Siege), and Section Speciale (Special Section), which earned Gavras the best director award at Cannes. His first big hit filmed in English was Missing (1981). The political thriller won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Festival and an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Since then, Gavras has been tackling burning issues of the era and has continued his work between France and the United States, directing 20 films. His latest, Adults in the Room is a tragedy in the classic sense and portrays a group of people “trapped in an inhuman network of power” and in the “brutal circle of the Eurogroup meetings, who impose on Greece the dictatorship of austerity”.