Part of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s mission is to foster greater understanding through world cinema. This year 72 Foreign Language films were submitted for Golden Globes consideration. Here is an overview of one of them.

Winner of the Silver Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival and based on a true story that shocked an entire nation, El Clan tells the story of Argentina’s Puccio family, a sinister clan devoted to kidnap, ransom and murder. But there is more at stake here than a simple crime story. Set against the backdrop of the final years of the Argentine military dictatorship and before the country’s return to democracy in the early 1980s, the film intertwines the Puccio family’s criminal enterprise with the country’s political context, the historical trauma that informs a large part of its contemporary cultural production.

Family patriarch Arquímedes plans each crime while his oldest son and star rugby player Alejandro helps pick their next victims. The entire family hides behind the façade of a typical family home in the respectable neighborhood of San Isidro while they live off the benefits yielded by the large ransoms paid by the families of their victims. The film is written by Pablo Trapero, Esteban Student and Julian Loyola. Trapero who directed the film, is no stranger to themes of ordinary lives and social criticism. His Carancho was selected as Argentina’s entry for the Academy Awards. White Elephant (2012) competed in the A Certain Regard section at Cannes and Trapro was back on the Riviera as president of that jury in 2014

With Student and Loyola he explores a painful chapter in his country’s history and at the same seeks to present a broader view of the moral degradation of life under dictatorial regimes. The parallel between dictatorial family patriarch Arquimedes Puccio (Guillermo Francella) and the generals of the failed Argentinian Junta are inescapable. In this case, the film suggests, “the fathers of the nation”, the generals, were equally monstrous as the pater familias Puccio.

Serge Rakhlin