Costa Gavras will receive the dignity of his life from the Locarno Film Festival

Legendary political director Costa Gavras (Z, lost) will receive this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Locarno International Film Festival.

The Greek filmmaker, who has been making social activist films for nearly 60 years, will be honored at the 75th Swiss Film Festival on August 11.

Locarno also shows two early works by Costa Gavras that are now rarely seen: shock troops Since 1967 and Sleeping car murders (1965).

Costa Gavras is probably best known for his political thrillers. ზ (1969), a review of the 1967 Greek military coup that won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 1970, as well as the Academy Award for Best Editing for Françoise Bono, and lost (1982), a dramatization of the CIA’s involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile, starring Jack Lemon and Sisi Spacek and nominated for four Oscars, Best Adapted Screenplay for Costa Rica and Co-Writer. Donald E. Stewart. Its last feature, adults in the roomWhich premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, saw the EU push a tougher agenda against Greece after the 2008/2009 financial meltdown.

Giona A. Nazaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, called Costa Gavras “a filmmaker who explored the larger story of the 20th century without being blinded by ideology.” Although Costa Gavras is considered a “political director”, he is, above all, an excellent author, endowed with an extraordinary sense of form and style. No one obeyed in a self-referential way, tirelessly updating their own look and approach. Costa Gavras is the epitome of a truly noble idea of ​​cinema as an instrument of progress and knowledge, a filmmaker who doesn’t stop talking to his audience, always offering his sincere version of entertainment, value and fun.

Costa Gavras will also participate in a roundtable in Locarno on 12 August.