I thought it was real because both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated the year before it came out and so much hope seemed to die with them on the floor of the kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel and on that balcony in Memphis.

I thought it was real because no one is brought to justice in the film and, by 1969, it seemed as though there would be no justice in America. I thought it was real because at the end of the film there is a long list of the artists, writers, and musicians who were banned when the military junta took over the government because of protests over the man's murder. It was a list of all the good things: The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, even Peanuts and Charles Schultz. In 1969, because of people like George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, I felt that could happen here.

So, I was a little paranoid as well as naïve.

Some public officials still try to get books banned. Apparently the vice presidential candidate for one of the political parties tried to fire a librarian who would not ban a certain book. But that kind of repression is not widespread. Neither is the kind of corruption that is represented in "Z." Politicians lie but only in the interest of getting elected and that is just part of the game. Everyone does it. So what?

"Z" isn't real, but it certainly feels real. The editing won an Academy Award in 1970. Costa Gavras, the director, was nominated as Best Director, as was the picture itself. Because the focus of the film is on the story, on what is happening, none of the acting calls attention to itself. The film is filled with wonderful performances that don't seem acted; they seem lived. It is great filmmaking of that type that holds the mirror up to nature when the mirror is clear and clean with no distortions.

It felt like it was happening right outside the doors of the theatre in 1969. And even today, watching it at home in the suburbs of a growing American city, safe and comfortable, it feels like it could be happening somewhere right now, in a small country where the press is controlled by corporations and military contractors have a lot to gain by perpetuating a useless war. And a small cabal of men in suits, a tiny portion of the population, controls the economy while the middle class disappears and the underclass grows in size and desperation. Where the intelligent, educated people, Spiro Agnew's "effete snobs," Sarah Palin's "East Coast elite" are considered the enemy of the state because they think too much and ask too many questions. But there I go, getting paranoid again. It's just a movie. But, a really good one.