State of Siege (1972) on Netflix
Philip Michael Santore, an American official with a counterinsurgency agency, is posted to South America. A band of Tupamaro guerrillas there takes him and two other officials captive.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.7/106,826 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Posted to a South American country, Philip Michael Santore works for the United States Agency for International Development, a counterinsurgency agency, and is listed as a communications consultant. A band of Tupamaro guerrillas hijacks cars and seizes three hostages: the American embassy's second secretary, the Consul of Brazil and Santore. The second secretary is released; the other two remain captive. Santore's masked captors treat him well and question him about his work, while the military and police mount a massive operation and cannot find them. The guerrillas propose an exchange, their captives for political prisoners held by the government, which refuses.
Cast
- Evangeline Petersonas Mrs. Santore
- Nemesio Antúnezas President of the Republic
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about State of Siege (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A planned April 1973 screening of State of Siege at an American Film Institute festival in Washington, D.C. was cancelled by AFI director George Stevens, who argued the film rationalized an act of political assassination; twelve filmmakers, including François Truffaut, withdrew their films in protest.
- State of Siege was shot in Chile under Salvador Allende's democratic socialist government, just before the 1973 coup; Allende backed the project, but Costa-Gavras faced opposition from Chilean Communist Party members and the conservative mayor of Las Condes during filming.
- Costa-Gavras read about Dan Mitrione's case in the French newspaper Le Monde while living in Paris, then went to Uruguay to investigate it himself, accompanied by screenwriter Franco Solinas of The Battle of Algiers.
- The film's story comes from the 1970 kidnapping and killing of Dan Mitrione, a United States Agency for International Development official, by the Uruguayan Tupamaros.
