Asaltar los cielos (1997) watch online HD

The film walks along the life of a dark (until this film) character involved in some of the main historical movements of the XX century. In the voice of the people who met him, we know the Spaniard communist who murdered the exiled Soviet leader León Trotski. Mercader (his real last name) was the son of a woman who was one of the main communist leaders in the Spanish Civil War; grows as an immigrant child in the recent born URSS, becomes a Communist warrior and plays as a peon in the confrontation of the ideological (and real) wars of the world until his lonely death in Cuba. The film goes from Spain to Russia, France, US, Mexico and Cuba following the, most of the time, underground life of this singular man. We met in the voice and gestures of his schoolmates, lover's friends, relatives, victim's followers, jail mates, official and unofficial documents, a man who did the dirty (or heroic) work of kill one of the main leaders of the Soviet Revolution. This man sacrifices his entire life as a Soldier of the Revolution with the only pay of a medal and a retirement bonus. Martyr or victim of ideological manipulation? This is a masterful piece of modern history in a documentary film.

A somewhat conventional but nevertheless very interesting Spanish documentary about Ramon Mercader, the Catalan assassin of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Following the orders of Stalin's security services, Mercader used the assumed name of Frank Jackson and got close to the exiled revolutionary by seducing a woman of his inner circle. We learn about his background (his mother was a hard line Stalinist), about how the assassination took place (with an ice ax, this is naturally the most interesting part of the film), and what happened to him after he was released following a 20 year old sentence in prison (he moved to Cuba and then to the Soviet Union, where he would live until the late 1970s and where he is buried; apparently in his old age he was mildly disillusioned with the socialist system).