Complications abound in this French film, which tells the story of a filmmaker who is attempting to put his real life into a movie; his interactions with the people in the movie he is filming create reverberations in his "real" life, although the past remains unchanged. Among the complications is his growing regard for the woman who plays his cinematic wife. She may wind up replacing his actual wife in real life. One of the highlights of this film is the insight it gives into the actual mechanics of filmmaking.
Using the interrogation of a US counterinsurgency agent as a backdrop, the film explores the consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas.
The vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia, knowing he's being watched and followed, is one day arrested and put into solitary confinement.
Amid a tense political climate, the opposition leader is killed in an apparent accident. When a prosecutor smells a cover-up, witnesses get targeted. A thinly veiled dramatization of the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis and its aftermath, “Z” captures the outrage at the US-backed junta that ruled Greece at the time of its release.
A young student visits the home of a friend who has all the good looks, women and luck. Every day, through binoculars from his friend's window, he sees a young girl in front of her home. Although attractive, the woman's face has been badly scarred. He finds out her phone number and the two engage in pleasant conversation. He gets up enough nerve to ask to meet her in person, but the socially inept young man becomes paralyzed with fear. He again summons the courage to meet with her before he is plagued with fear once again.
A French resistance group frees twelve captured soldiers from a German prison camp, but apparently there is an additional prisoner among them who is suspected of being an enemy spy.