Z

Sunday, February 7th at 1:00 p.m.
and Tuesday, February 9th at 7:00 p.m.
ADMISSION: FREE
**$5.00 suggested donation**

All ESSENTIAL CINEMA films screen Sunday at 1:00 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., and admission is FREE!
See classic art films the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in 35 mm!

ACADEMY AWARD WINNER! BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, 1969

"AN EXTRAORDINARY THRILLER! One of the fastest, most exciting melodramas ever made! Remember when movie ads used to say 'It Will Knock You Out Of Your Seat'? Well, Z damn near does." - PAULINE KAEL

"ELECTRIFYINGLY BRUTAL! A dose of Costa-Gavras' thriller will rattle you ... Z remains as fresh as a head wound." - David Edelstein, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

"BRILLIANT! UNBEARABLY EXCITING! It will make you weep and will make you angry. It will tear your guts out." - ROGER EBERT

Costa-Gavras based his Academy Award-winning, breakneck political thriller on the controversial real-life 1963 assassination of Greek revolutionary Gregoris Lambrakis and the subsequent government cover-up. In the film, noted leftist actor Yves Montand (Godard's Tout Va Bien) plays a politician whose murder sparks a young magistrate, Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist), to lead a harrowing investigation that eventually implicates the entire regime.
Too much of a political hot potato for French film producers, Greek expat Costa-Gavras’s adaptation of Vassili Vassilikos’s novel of the Lambrakis case was skillfully filmed on a shoestring budget in Algeria (doubling for Greece).
Fiercely passionate and built for maximum movie-going thrills, Z has Costa-Gavras pulling no punches as he lambastes the authoritarian-aided assassination and the political left’s impotency in the matter. Stunning documentary-style cinematography by New Wave camera legend Raoul Coutard, combined with Costa-Gavras’ bullet-quick editing, gave Z an immediacy, authenticity, and excitement, that, along with perfect timing — premiering so soon after the right-wing colonels’ takeover in Greece — made it a worldwide smash and the winner of both the Cannes Jury Prize (awarded unanimously) and the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Essential Cinema is supported in part by The Arizona Commission on the Arts, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.