The Confession

Costa-Gavras made The Confession (L'Aveu) directly after Z, and it plays as that film's deliberate counterweight. Where Z had taken aim at a right-wing conspiracy in Greece, this one turns to the Stalinist show trials of Eastern Europe, adapting the memoir of Artur London, the Czechoslovak deputy foreign minister and one of the defendants in the 1952 Slánský trial. Claude Lanzmann suggested the story to him over a Christmas dinner while Z was still being edited; Jorge Semprún wrote the screenplay.

Yves Montand plays Gérard, a veteran of Spain and the Resistance and a loyal party man in 1951 Prague, who notices he is being followed and is soon taken by a security apparatus that answers to no authority he can name. Held in isolation and deprived of sleep, he is pressed to confess to crimes he cannot identify. Simone Signoret, Montand's wife off screen, plays his wife Lise, told to trust the party. Montand lost more than fifteen kilos for the role, and Raoul Coutard shot the film almost entirely in story order, on location in Lille, Roubaix and Arras, which stand in for Prague.

Released in April 1970, it drew more than two million admissions in France and a furious response from the French Communist Party, which accused Costa-Gavras of turning a communist book into an anti-communist film; he insisted it was a plea against totalitarianism and Stalinism. Vincent Canby found it more interesting than Z precisely because its subject was more complex and more human. It earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and Criterion restored it in 2015 alongside State of Siege, completing the director's political trilogy with Montand.