A Spanish construction worker turns forger and takes on one of the world's biggest banks in "A Man of Action," a 2022 biography-crime-drama built around the real life of Lucio Urtubia.
What is A Man of Action about?
Set largely in Paris and Barcelona, the film follows a bricklayer-turned-anarchist who discovers that patience, printing skill, and a taste for risk can do more damage to a bank than any bomb. Rather than staging a heist in the usual sense, he builds a slow, meticulous counterfeiting scheme meant to embarrass and financially wound an institution he sees as symbolic of everything wrong with unchecked capital. Director Javier Ruiz Caldera moves between decades, tracking how a young laborer's political education hardens into a decades-long private war conducted with ledgers, plates, and nerve rather than weapons. The film treats its protagonist's ideology seriously without turning the story into a lecture, keeping the focus on the mechanics of the scheme and the toll it takes on the people around him.
About the cast
Juan José Ballesta anchors the film as its central figure, with Miki Esparbé, Luis Callejo, and Liah O'Prey rounding out a cast that spans the story's Spanish and French settings. Alexandre Blazy, Josean Bengoetxea, Philip Schurer, and Daniel Chamorro fill out the wider ensemble across the film's 111-minute runtime.
Context & significance
"A Man of Action" sits within a run of European biography-dramas that use one ordinary tradesman's story to examine larger post-war political currents, pairing the crime-drama momentum of a long con with the historical texture of mid-twentieth-century anarchist movements. The Spanish production draws its dramatic and historical weight from Urtubia's documented activities rather than from an invented crime plot, which shapes the film's slower, procedural pacing.
Watching A Man of Action on Ktime
"A Man of Action" streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the film's dialogue-heavy, multi-decade story either way. The film's page is free to browse without an account; watching it requires only a free K-Time login, with the full interface available in Farsi for the diaspora audience.