State of Siege

Yves Montand plays Philip Michael Santore, an official of the United States Agency for International Development (an organisation sometimes used as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods). Posted to a fictional South American country in the early 1970s, Santore is kidnapped by a group of urban guerrillas. Using Santore's interrogation by his captors as a backdrop, the film explores the often brutal consequences of the struggle between the repressive government of Montevideo and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas. Using death squads, the government decimates the revolutionary group, whose surviving members vote to execute the smugly calculating Santore, who is accused of arranging training in torture and political manipulation. The story is based by Costa Gavras on an actual incident in Uruguay in 1970 when U.S. Embassy official Dan Mitrione was kidnapped and killed. (Moscow International Film Festival)