Atlantic Film Festival 2010

The code name "Jackal" was synonymous with high-stakes espionage, and globe-spanning plots to topple governments and assassinate world leaders of the kind usually only found in spy novels and James Bond movies. During the 1970s and 1980s, through the last days of the Cold War, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. Carlos The Jackal, created and operated a worldwide terrorist network rooted in a kind of Marxist doctrine that wasn't averse to some mercenary guns-and-bombs-for-hire fundraising. For two decades his deadly, and sometimes failed, exploits on behalf of various East Block and Middle Eastern nations and secret service agencies made headlines everywhere. Olivier Assayas' film Carlos sifts through Sanchez' many identities and tries to build an image of the man who was Carlos, once the most dangerous enemy of the free world.

, now serving a life sentence in a French prison.

Incredibly, the man who was probably the most-wanted and most-hunted enemy agent from behind the Iron Curtain remained at large for nearly 30 years, finally arrested by French police in 1997.

Carlos became a truly international figure in 1975 following the violent and bloody hostage taking of OPEC ministers at a conference in Vienna. Carlos and his team took 33 hostages on an international flight through the Middle East, releasing them gradually and themselves walking away into legend—heroes or super-villains in a shadow war.