Movie suggests U.S. role in execution

Press, 5 March 1982, Page 15

Movie suggests U.S. role in execution

By

BRUCE RUSSELL

Costa-Gavras. director of the movie "Z.” is no stranger to official hostility and friends in Western Europe warned him that his latest film, “Missing.” could provoke the biggest uproar of all.

But Costa-Gavras, a Greek-born French national, says that since the release of “Missing," which explores the possibility of United States officials conniving in the execution of a young American writer in the 1973 Chilean military coup, he has run into no hostility at all.

The only official reaction has been' a diplomatically worded denial by the State Department that United States officials were in any way involved in the execution of the writer, Charles Horman.

The release of "Missing." comes at a time when United States public opinion is highly sensitive to the possibility of direct United States military ' involvement in El Salvador.

“Friends in France warned me when I returned here, ‘You’re going to the United States. They’ll never let you in’,” Mr Costa-Gavras says. “But the Europeans do riot understand the diversity of puolic opinion .here. I have had no difficulties,” he adds.

Both Democratic and Republican congressmen attended a special showing in Washington of "Missing” and Costa-Gavras says the reactions he got from members of both parties were largely favourable.

He was told that Senator Charles Percy. Republican leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a closed committee meeting on El Salvador that whether committee members agreed with "Missing” or not they should see the film. The State Department statement, released after the special showing, said: "The department regrets the sad death of Charles Horman as well as the efforts by some to read into it possible involvement by the United States Government and its officials, which the record indicates is wholly unwarranted.”

"Missing" tells the story of an anguished search by Charles Hormans father,

businessman Ed Horman, and his eventual discovery that his son had been executed in a Santiago stadium used by the Chilean military as a holding area for dissidents.

Jack Lemmon plays the role of the father and Sissy Spacek that of young Horman’s wife, who joins her father-in-law in the search.

The film, like the book "The Execution of Charles Horman” by Thomas Hauser, on which it is based, leaves the impression that United States military officials in Santiago worked closely with the Chilean army and may have known about Horman s execution and done nothing to stop it.

Costa-Gavras’s movies have in the past drawn the ire both of right and leftwing authoritarian governments. "Z.” which was about the military dictatorship in was banned there during the rule of the colonels, but released to enormous acclaim when military government ended. His film, “The Confession.” about the use of trumped-up confessions in communist trials, was bitterly attacked by communist officials and has never been shown in a communist State. Mr Costa-Gavras recalls with a laugh that one communist paper, assuming from his name that he was a Spaniard, described him as the fascist son of a general of the Franco era. “I think they were getting me mixed up with Costa Brava.” He says he first became interested in the subject of missing people through the plight of Argentinian women waiting in a Buenos Aires square for news of their vanished husbands and sons. “Amnesty International sent me a lot of evidence and testimony of the Argentinian-’ women but I couldn’t do anything with that because it was so complicated — so many people, so many stories.' “Then I read this story and it was clear and documented and very moving,” he says. "It was the tragedy of a family set within the tragedy of a country." (NZPAReuter).