Carlos

Film Info

France, Germany
2010
339 minutes
Color
2.35:1
English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian
Spine #582

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, is an epic, intensely detailed account of the life of the infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—also known as Carlos the Jackal. One of the twentieth century’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos was committed to violent left-wing activism throughout the seventies and eighties, orchestrating bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. Assayas portrays him not as a criminal mastermind but as a symbol of seismic political shifts around the world, while the magnetic Édgar Ramírez brilliantly embodies him as a swaggering global gangster. Criterion presents the complete, uncut, director-approved, five-and-a-half-hour version of Carlos.

Cast

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (a.k.a. Carlos)	Édgar Ramírez
Johannes Weinrich	Alexander Scheer
Magdalena Kopp	Nora Von Waldstatten
Wadie Haddad	Ahmad Kaabour
Hans-Joachim Klein (a.k.a. Angie)	Christoph Bach
Anis Naccache (a.k.a. Khalid)	Rodney El-Haddad
Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann (a.k.a. Nada)	Julia Hummer
Joseph	Rami Farah
Youssef	Zeid Hamdan
Kamal al-Issawi (a.k.a. Ali)	Talal el-Jurdi
Michel Moukharbal (a.k.a. André)	Fadi Abi Samra
Wilfried Böse (a.k.a. Boni)	Aljoscha Stadelmann
Brigitte Kuhlmann	Katharina Schüttler
German militant	Jule Bowe
Carlos's girlfriend	Juana Acosta
Amparo	Martha Higareda
Ambassador in The Hague	Jean-Baptiste Malartre
Captain Jean Herranz	Olivier Cruveiller
General Philippe Rondot	André Marcon
Maître Jacques Vergès	Nicolas Briançon
Erik	Jean-Baptiste Montagut
Lana Jarrar	Razane Jammal

Credits

Director	Olivier Assayas
Producer	Daniel Leconte
Writers	Olivier Assayas and Dan Franck
Based on an original idea by	Daniel Leconte
Historical adviser	Stephen Smith
Executive producer	Raphael Cohen
Coproducers	Jens Meurer and Judy Tossell
Cinematographers	Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir
Set design	François-Renaud Labarthe
Costumes	Jurgen Doering
Editor	Luc Barnier
Sound	Nicolas Cantin and Nicolas Moreau

Disc Features

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

High-definition digital transfer, supervised by cinematographers Denis Lenoir and Yorick Le Saux (with DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition)
New video interviews with director Olivier Assayas, actor Édgar Ramírez, and Lenoir
Selected-scene commentary featuring Lenoir
Carlos: Terrorist Without Borders, an hour-long documentary on the career of Carlos
Archival interview with Carlos associate Hans-Joachim Klein, by Jean-Marcel Bougreau and Daniel Leconte
Maison de France, a feature-length documentary on a Carlos bombing not included in the film
Twenty-minute making-of documentary on the film’s OPEC raid scene
Original theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critics Colin MacCabe and Greil Marcus, as well as a timeline of Carlos’s life and biographies of selected figures portrayed in the film, written by Carlos’s historical adviser, Stephen Smith