Costa Gavras Set for Locarno Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Honor
variety.comNick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThe Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to Greek-French director Costa-Gavras with its Pardo alla carriera lifetime achievement award.The longtime Paris-based master of politically engaged cinema will be on hand at the prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie filmmaking to receive the prize during a ceremony on its Piazza Grande square on Aug.
11 followed by an audience-led conversation the next day.Locarno will also host screenings of two of Costa Gravras’ lesser known films: “Un homme de trop” (“Shock Troops”) from 1967, and “Compartiment tueurs” (“The Sleeping Car Murders”), which is his 1965 debut feature.In a career spanning nearly 60 years, Costa-Gavras — which is short for Konstantinos Gavras — has become known for highly political works, such as 1969’s “Z,” about the military’s coup d’etat in Greece, which won the foreign film Oscar in 1969; and 1982’s “Missing,” which starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in a story inspired by the military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende.
His 1989 “Music Box,” about the crisis of conscience of a young Chicago lawyer, played by Jessica Lange, defending her father at a deportation hearing where he is accused of Holocaust-era crimes, won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear as well as an Oscar nomination for Lang.
Costa-Gavras’ most recent film is “Adults in the Room,” a 2019 drama about the financial crisis that hit Greece in 2015. The 89-year-old director has also appeared in front of the camera in three pics by John Landis: “Spies Like Us” (1985); “The Stupids” (1996) and “Burke and Hare” (2010).
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