Konstantinos "Kostas" Gavras, known professionally as Costa-Gavras, is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Most of his films have been made in French, but six of them were made in English.

Z is a 1969 political thriller film directed by Costa-Gavras, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jorge Semprún, adapted from the 1967 novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos. The film presents a thinly fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of the democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. With its dark view of Greek politics and its downbeat ending, the film captures the director's outrage about the junta that then ruled Greece. The title refers to a popular Greek protest slogan meaning "he lives," in reference to Lambrakis.