The US’s history of intervening in democratic processes around the world deserves more attention in the light of current political developments, playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has said, as his Oscar-tipped film about a rueful CIA agent premieres at the Venice film festival. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.” In Wild Horse Nine, John Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran agent for the foreign intelligence service who is stationed in Santiago, Chile, on the eve of the US-supported coup against Salvador Allende – Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president – in 1973. Recently diagnosed with cancer and acting erratically, Chris is dispatched to Easter Island with his protege Lee (Sam Rockwell), where he starts to reflect critically on his role in other CIA interventions, including the Guatemalan coup d’état of 1954, the 1961 assassination of revolutionary Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and – according to the film’s telling – the killing of John F Kennedy.
McDonagh said he had originally set out writing a screenplay about a father and son who were both actors, but the story had only started to gel when he tied the story to the CIA overthrow of Allende. Asked at the press conference what they thought of the Trump administration’s illegal capturing of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January, the US members of the cast looked reluctant to answer. London-born Irish national McDonagh took over the mic instead.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
