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Cannes Film Festival

Carlos is screened despite legal action and trade row

Carlos – a 14-million-euro film on the life of jailed terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez – is showing at Cannes on Wednesday. That’s despite its subject’s efforts to win the right to impose cuts and criticisms that it is really a TV series and so should not be in competition.

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Olivier Assayas’s film, which lasts five hours 33 minutes, looks at the life of the last century’s most famous armed left-wing radical and takes his nom de guerre as its title.

It shows Ramirez Sanchez as an internationalist revolutionary but also as a money-grubbing mercenary and Don Juan.

The portraits doesn’t please the film’s subject, who is currently serving a life sentence in a French prison for the 1975 murder of two police officers and an informant. He says that the scenario contains lies and deliberate historical falsifications.

Despite being in jail, in January he went to court to try and gain the right to see the film and demands cuts and changes. The bid was unsuccessful.

The film faced further obstacles when Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux proposed it be shown in competition.

It is to be run as a three-part series by subscription-only TV channel Canal+, which financed it, and the first part is being screened on the same day as it is shown at Cannes.

That has outraged some cinema professionals who point out that films usually have to wait four months before appearing on DVD and 10-12 months before being broadcast on cable television.

Assayas pleads that he could never found the finance for his film if he had relied on French cinema producers.

But Carlos is not being shown in competition.

The film’s star, 32-year-old Edgar Ramirez – no relation but a fellow-Venezuelan – speaks five languages and put on ten kilos to play the role.

“He is more than the actor in this film, he is its raison d’être,” Assayas says.
 

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