Director Costa-Gavras to Be Honored with Lifetime Cesar Award
The French Film Academy will honor legendary political filmmaker Costa-Gavras with its lifetime achievement award at the upcoming 2025 César Awards.
The 91-year-old auteur, born in Greece before fleeing to exile in Paris, is best known for his politically-charged cinema, including Oscar winners Z (1969) — a thinly fictionalized account of the assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 that led to the country’s long military dictatorship — and English-language feature Missing (1982), about the disappearance of an American journalist in the aftermath of the United States-backed Chilean coup of 1973.
Z was the first film to be nominated both for best picture and best international feature at the Academy Awards, winning the latter, as well as the Oscar for best film editing for Françoise Bonnot. Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and was nominated for four Oscars, winning for best adapted screenplay.
Costa-Gavras‘ other notable features include Music Box (1989), starring Jessica Lange as a Chicago defense attorney who defends her immigrant father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) when he is accused of war crimes; Amen (2003), about the Vatican’s alleged collaboration with the Nazis during World War II; and Adults in the Room (2019), a drama looking at the collapse of the Greek economy in 2015 and the attempt by the Greek government to oppose harsh austerity measures imposed on it by the European Union. The latter was Costa-Gavras’ first film shot in Greece in the Greek language.
Alongside Missing, his English-language features include Mad City starring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman, Betrayed with Debra Winger and Tom Berenger and Hanna K., starring Jill Clayburgh as the child of Holocaust survivors who is the court-appointed lawyer assigned to defend a Palestinian (Mohammad Bakri) accused of terrorism.