Costa-Gavras

Konstantinos 'Kostas' Gavras, known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. Born on February 12, 1933, in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia, Greece, his family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. Unable to attend university in Greece due to his father's Communist Party membership, he settled in France and began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951. He abandoned his university studies in 1956 to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. His first feature film was Compartiment Tueurs in 1965. Costa-Gavras is known for his political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award. Costa-Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Subjects such as law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common in his work. He was president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again since 2007.