During the 53rd Thessaloniki Film Festival, beloved Greek director Costa-Gavras attended the Greek premier of his latest film ‘Capital’ (2012). The film focuses on the world’s current economic situation where big business and capital are partaking in a form of economic terrorism with many conglomerate corporations controlling much of the world’s wealth resulting in the crippling of whole national economies. Greece itself has felt the repercussions of this crises and global phenomenon. This film tackles the issue head-on. Costa likens the situation to a game at which all of us are at play and which we will not stop playing until everyone and everything is destroyed and collapses. Received with appraisal by Greek audiences, the film is now released in France, where Costa currently resides, and soon to be released internationally.

Q & A with director after 'Capital' premier:

COSTA: I wanted to make a film about money and the role it has in our society.

Q: Do you think that cinema can help in this current crises?

COSTA: Cinema can change many things but not everything. Since cinema appeared about 117 years ago, it has changed a lot of things. It changes us, it changes situations and we manage to reach a lot of people all around the world to meet each other. When a film ends it makes you happy or sad or disturbed. That was my intention, to make you feel disturbed after watching my film. You remember the film ‘Wall Street’, everyone was happy after the film because the bad guy was punished and went to prison. But it was all a lie and was fake. I have to tell you that everything in my film was real, even the numbers were real. I had a banker read the script and he advised us to raise the numbers because they were originally too low. I needed to base the film on real facts, on reality, not a fiction film because there are some things in the film that are so impossible to believe that you can’t even imagine to be real.

Q: You’re actually working as a reporter on this film as you were recording so many facts about the economic situation. Based on that can you make any predictions about what the situation will be in the future?

COSTA: The question is why don’t we stop the war before we have victims? Well, in the case for 3,000 years now we are doing the same thing. We are going down and then we are emerging again. There was the Greek Civil War, there was a German occupation, etc., but in the end Greeks end up winners.

Q: It’s a film about the function of capital and you propose solutions with this film when at the end you say that ‘it’s a game and like children we play it until we get destroyed’. The uncle in the film said everything with these words when he said ‘you destroy people, you destroy jobs, you destroy working people…’ We don’t have to say anything more. Congratulations! You have said everything with your film.

COSTA: Thank you! Thank you very much.

Written by Vanessa McMahon; November 04, 2012

photos by Vanessa McMahon