Costa-Gavras to be honoured at San Sebastian

Costra-Gavras will receive the Donostia Award on September 21 Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

French filmmaker Costa-Gavras is to receive a Donostia Award at San Sebastian Film Festival next month.

The Greek-born writer/director, whose films include Z, Capital, Eden Is West and The Axe, was last at the festival when Capital competed for the Golden Shell in 2012.

He will collect the award on September 21 at a gala screening of his latest feature film, Adults In The Room, an adaptation of of the memoir of the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

The film, which will have its world premiere in Venice - where Costa-Gavras will receive the Glory to the Filmmaker Award - was published after Varoufakis’s brief term of office in 2015, at the height of Greek’s financial crisis. The cast includes Christos Loulis, Alexandros Bourdoumis, Josiane Pinson and Valeria Golino.

Adults In The Room Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

Costa-Gavras - who became a naturalised French citizen in 1956 - said: “You never forget the country of your birth, especially when it is a country like Greece. I fled my country because, back then, all it offered to young people of my social class was a life of submission to a theocratic-democracy. As an immigrant, France allowed me to surpass my wildest dreams.

"My 'Greekness' took hold of me again when the colonels seized power. The expression of my personal resistance was Z. Ten years ago, the Greek crisis plunged the country back into the same situation that made me flee in the first place. And this, of course, made me want to express my revolt once again, with Adults in the Room.”

The festival runs form September 20 to 28.