Adults in the Room

An account of the debt negotiations between Greece and the European institutions in 2015. Yanis Varoufakis becomes finance minister after the election of January 2015. His aim is to change the terms of the debt agreement. Facing him is the Eurogroup: the finance ministers of nineteen countries, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The film takes place almost entirely in meeting rooms. What it describes is not economics but procedure: who has the right to speak, which document is put on the table and when, what is said in unofficial conversations, and whether the meeting is being recorded. The source is Varoufakis's own book. He recorded nearly every meeting he attended as minister and gave those recordings, with his notes, to Costa-Gavras. That is also the most contested thing about it: the narrative is built from one side's view and the other side mostly appears cold and calculating. Costa-Gavras directed. Christos Loulis plays Varoufakis and Alexandros Bourdoumis plays Tsipras. It screened out of competition at the Venice film festival in 2019. An interesting record for anyone curious about political cinema and recent history. For a viewer expecting a dramatic narrative, the film is largely meetings and the pace runs flat.