State of Siege
- "State of Siege" is also the name of a thriller by Eric Ambler.
| State of Siege (État de Siège) |
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|---|---|
| Directed by | Costa-Gavras |
| Produced by | Jacques Henri Barratier Léon Sanz |
| Written by | Franco Solinas Costa-Gavras |
| Starring | Yves Montand Renato Salvatori O.E. Hasse |
| Music by | Mikis Theodorakis |
| Cinematography | Pierre-William Glenn |
| Distributed by | Cinema 5 Distributing |
| Release date(s) | 1972 |
| Running time | 120 min |
| Language | French |
State of Siege (French title: État de Siège) is a 1972 French film directed by Costa Gavras starring Yves Montand and Renato Salvatori.
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[edit] Summary
Yves Montand plays Philip Michael Santore, an official of the US Agency for International Development (an organisation sometimes used as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods). Posted to a fictional South American country in the early 1970s, Santore is kidnapped by a group of urban guerrillas. The story is based by Costa Gavras on an actual incident in Uruguay in 1970 when U.S. Embassy official Dan Mitrione was kidnapped and killed.
Using Santore's interrogation by his captors as a backdrop, the film explores the often brutal consequences of the struggle between the repressive government of Montevideo and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas. Using death squads, the government decimates the revolutionary group, whose surviving members vote to execute the smugly calculating Santore, who is accused of arranging training in torture and political manipulation. In the finale a replacement U.S. official arrives, watched from the crowd by a defiant and angry survivor of the radical group.
[edit] Cast
- Yves Montand - Philip Michael Santore
- Renato Salvatori - Captain Lopez
- O.E. Hasse - Carlos Ducas
- Jacques Weber - Hugo
- Jean-Luc Bideau - Este
- Jacques Perrin
[edit] Response
The film opened to positive reviews from critics and is regarded as one of Costa-Gavras' finest works since the 1969 film Z. While it was released one year later in American theaters, a storm of controversy developed. Many U.S. officials hated the movie and even stated that it was a heap of lies about U.S. involvment in Latin America and other third world countries. Before the 1970s ended, many who decried the film as false found themselves admitting involvement in Latin America, this during the investigations and commitee hearings on the CIA and other government groups.
[edit] Music
Mikis Theodorakis used the same melodies that he later used in Canto General.
[edit] Awards
The film was nominated to the Golden Globes as Best Foreign Language Film and won the UN Award at BAFTA Awards.
[edit] External links
- État de siège at the Internet Movie Database
- Review of the movie by Roger Ebert
- Pages 58-59 TIME Magazine 23 April 1973
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