Closing film to ‘shock audience with reality’

Panaji: The curtains of this year’s edition of Iffi will come to a close with Argentina’s Oscar nominated film ‘El Clan’ (The Clan), directed by Pablo Trapero. Speaking to TOI, the film’s crew shares how the dark film appealed to viewers and their delightful surprise on having been selected for Iffi.
“We thought ‘El Clan’ had an appeal in Argentina because it’s part of our history but we never expected it to be a hit in other countries.The fact that it got selected for Iffi is overwhelming,”said the film’s editor Alejandro Carrillo Penovi.
Directed by Pablo Trapero, ‘El Clan’ is based on the scandalous case of the Puccio family, who kidnapped people in the 1980s and killed them. It had the largest opening weekend of any Argentinean film in history, and broke all past box-office records.
Speaking about Trapero’s vision of the film, his team said that the director wanted to portray societal hypocrisy through a hateful family that uses subtle and non-subtle means of violence to physically and psychologically torture its hostages.
“Argentine society was shocked that this middle class family had this set up. It was only later that we understood the meaning behind the morbid attraction to this subject. For us it was an exorcism of evil within us,” they said.
The director could not make it to Iffi due to other commitments.
In order to prepare for the film, the team studied the Puccios’ judicial files and legal proceedings. They also interacted with the judges, lawyers, family of the victims, and even traced the survivors of the Puccio family.
Asked how a film with such a morbid themes could hit it off so well with not only native audiences but across the world, Penovi said, “Morbid films have the power of showing you something you're not prepared for. Movies need to shock you and the only way to do that is by showing obscene reality onscreen. El Clan hit the nail there.”