Martin McDonagh recalls the U.S. government being smart enough to hide its international crimes

The Venice Film Festival often gets political, and going into this year’s iteration, there was already an open letter from artists demanding support for Gaza from the festival. Now, a couple of days into the proceedings, director Martin McDonagh used his time with the press to remind everyone that the CIA has done a lot of bad, shady things. The director, whose last film before this was 2022’s The Banshees Of Inisherin, is there with the film Wild Horse Nine, which involves the CIA-backed coup in Chile in the 1970s. “I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh said when asked about the film, according to The Guardian. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”