El clan

This filming of the true, shocking story of the Puccio clan by director Pablo Trapero (Tiger Award winner with Crane World, 1999), with Guillermo Francella in the main role as psychopathic family head (and former junta collaborator), was a hit in Argentina and good for a Silver Lion in Venice for Best Director.
In the early 1980s the Puccios kidnap fellow neighbourhood residents in Buenos Aires to ask ransom, then kill them anyway. On the surface the members of the family are all decent shopkeepers, who dutifully sweep their own doorstep. Meanwhile they sway the sceptre in a horror-like shadow world, with terrified, gagged victims in the cellar. The state of mind and methods of the family - whose distorted relationships the film incisively shows with lively pop songs as wry counterpoint - are intimately related to the dictatorship, the power structures of which have persisted underground since the introduction of democracy in 1983.