State of Siege | Blu-ray

Perhaps no director has so clearly made it his life's work to speak out against dictatorship, fascism, and imperialism than Costa-Gavras. Between works like Shock Tropps and Z to Hanna K. and Missing, he has built a rich filmography challenging the ways in which political power is asserted all across the globe.

In State of Siege, the target is two-fold. On the one hand, the film details the kidnapping and killing of USAID official Dan Mitrione by Uruguayan radicals in 1970, exposing the extremely polarizing political climate of violent extremism and heavy handed government crackdowns present in the country at the time. 

At the same time, Costa-Gavras details the many well founded posthumous accusations that surfaced against Mitrione accusing him of being a US government agent sent to South America to train US-friendly dictatorships in the art of torture and interrogation in order to quell leftist political uprising. The result is one of the most compelling and well constructed rebukes of American imperialism put on film.