After navigating the winding backstreets of Beirut by taxi and motorbike, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez arrives at a nondescript house in one of the Lebanese capital's quieter neighbourhoods. It's July 24, 1973, and the Venezuelan brushes past burly guards to enter a room. He is vying to become leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's European network. He tells the group's leader, Wadie Haddad, that it's time the front took 'the Palestinian struggle to an international level'.
So the rise of Carlos the Jackal begins - or that's how French filmmaker Olivier Assayas sees it - in the opening scenes of Carlos, his 5 1/2-hour, three-part biopic of the suave, self-styled liberation fighter-turned-mercenary whose nom de guerre is synonymous with 1970s and 80s terrorism. The director was in Hong Kong at the weekend for the first of three screenings of the shorter version of Carlos at this year's French Cinepanorama festival, which features a retrospective of his work.
'In terms of modern history, I think he [Carlos] embodies an idea which has not really been used in movies: that is, the notion of the geopolitical implications of terrorism,' Assayas says.
'There have been movies made about terrorism, but they've always been local - there are Japanese [Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army], Italian [Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night] or German [Uli Edel's The Baader-Meinhof Complex] films... but the stories of those guys make no sense if you disconnect them from transnational issues and political alliances. And Carlos, being a Latin American militant involved in Middle Eastern politics and active in Europe, brings that whole notion to life.'
Beginning with his induction into Haddad's inner circle, Carlos tracks the growing infamy of its protagonist (played by Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez) through his ever more audacious terrorist attacks. Among them were the December 1975 storming of an Opec conference at the cartel's Vienna headquarters, in which Carlos' group abducted several oil ministers, later releasing them for hefty ransoms. The incident is re-enacted in detail in Carlos, giving the series (and the three-hour theatrical version being screened here) the air of a scintillating action-thriller.
But while offering plenty of explosive set-pieces, Carlos is much more than bullets and blasts. The film depicts Carlos' wilderness years after that ill-fated hostage-taking plot: his falling out with Waddad over his handling of the incident - the group was supposed to kill the Saudi and Iranian ministers rather than ransom them.
