School of Law and Political Science

Special Section

Published on in Film Law

Speaker: Maxime Brenaut

► March 4, 2025 > 5:30 p.m.

► Building 1 > Cambacérès Lecture Hall (1.0.B)

A major milestone in Costa-Gavras’s collaboration with Jorge Semprun, *Special Section* reveals the details of how the Vichy government drafted an emergency law and how judges chaotically enforced it in 1941.

The dialectic of ends and means, the abandonment of the cardinal principles of liberal law, the retroactive application of a harsher criminal law, judicial arbitrariness and careerism, the effectiveness of the defense… All these classic themes are addressed in a clinical manner by this 1975 film, which features a remarkable cast.