Direction: Costa-Gavras
Country: France
Year:2019
Duration: 124 min.
Cast: Christos Loulis, Alexandros Bourdoumis, Ulrich Tukur, Josiane Pinson, Valeria Golino, Daan Schuurmans, Christos Stergioglou, Themis Panou, Aurélien Recoing, Vincent Nemeth, Cornelius Obonya, Francesco Acquaroli, Georges Corraface.
Script:Costa-Gavras. Book: Yanis Varoufakis
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Photography: Giorgos Arvanitis
Producer: Coproducción Francia-Grecia; Wild Bunch, Odeon, France 2 Cinema, K.G. Productions, Canal+
Genre: Drama. Based on real facts. Politics. 2008 economic crisis
Distributor:Wanda visión
Premiere in Spain: October 18, 2019
Original version: In several languages subtitles in Spanish
2020: European Film Awards: Nominated for Best Screenplay
2019: César Awards: Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay
2019: Venice Film Festival: Official Section (out of competition)
SYNOPSIS
In Adults in the Room, a human tragedy is at stake. It is a universal theme: a story of people trapped in an inhuman web of power. The ruthless succession of Eurogroup meetings, which impose the dictatorship of austerity on Greece, ignoring any sign of humanity and compassion.
THE CRITICISM
“A work of commendable finish and muscular staging, agile, accurate and above all entertaining, whose compact dramatic execution largely smoothes out Varoufakis’s egomania”
Costa-Gavras is one of the most respected European authors thanks to his committed cinema and works such as Z (Oscar for best foreign language film), Disappeared (Palme d’Or in Cannes) or The Music Box (Golden Bear in Berlin ), among other acclaimed works. His recent Donostia award has also served to remind us that, at 86 years old, the Greek continues to wage war.
Adults in the room takes us back to 2015 to remind us how Syriza, a left-wing party, won the Greek elections with the promise of saving the economy of a country in crisis, and increasingly ruined by tax increases, social cuts and “bailouts” from the Troika. The goal: to renegotiate the debt to allow growth and give desperate Greek society a break. The hero who launches into the mission: Varoufakis.
The film recounts the minister’s odyssey, his travels and numerous meetings with leaders, politicians and economists from other countries, as well as with members of his party, pressured by voters and the clock. His efforts to clarify the situation in Greece, and reach a reasonable agreement, collide with the wall of banks and Germany, which stands as the real power that pulls the strings in the EU. The only solution on the table is to comply with what was agreed by the previous government, that is, to continue squeezing the Greek people. Or the closing of the banks and the exit of the euro. We already know what happened…
In a certain scene, during one of the absurd and fruitless discussions, the exhausted head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, goes as far as to say that adults are needed in that room. It is the conclusion that any viewer reaches after witnessing the protagonist’s frustrated efforts, when it is verified that logic is of no use in the face of certain interests, that the ideals of the EU are little more than a pretty facade and something as elementary as democracy is, in fact, impossible to carry out due to the inhumane mechanisms exposed by Costa-Gavras.
Next screening: April 21, 2022
MEDITERRANEAN by Marcel Barrena
Fall 2015. Two lifeguards, Óscar (Eduard Fernández) and Gerard (Dani Rovira), travel to the island of Lesbos, shocked by the photograph of a child drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean.
