Interview: Argentinian director Trapero presents criminal family story in Venice

"What's interesting for me was to tell the story of the relation between a father and his son and this is universal," Argentinian movie director Pablo Trapero told Xinhua.

"I liked the story of this family because through it I could stress the main theme of the film, which is duplicity. If we read the news every day, unfortunately, duplicity is still present in our society; this difficulty to face reality and problems can be seen nowadays," Trapero said.

"This story happened also because people felt this criminal reality very far from them; indifference was one of the causes of that," Trapero said during an interview with Xinhua presenting in competition his movie El Clan at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.

Trapero presented his films three times at the Cannes Film Festival where he was selected for the main competition in 2008 with Leonera. In 1999 he presented Mundo grua at the Venice Film Festival.

El Clan takes place in the early 1980s and tells the story of the Puccio, an Argentinian criminal family famous for its kidnappings and homicides.

Arquimedes Puccio (Guillermo Francella) ruled the operations, and his eldest son Alejandro (Juan Pedro Lanzani) assisted him to find potential victims.

The director took the inspiration by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, then the Italian cinema in general, Scorsese and Tarantino.

Asked about why he focused his movie on the life of criminals, he said " I always ask to myself how it's possible, as we see in the movie, that a mother ends up arrested with her son; this limit between morality on one side and social on the other is something part of our daily life."

According to Trapero everybody has a moral limit in life and we are obliged to think which our limit is, it's interesting to investigate on how someone unintentionally can do bad actions.

Trapero know that the movie is not an easy one but in Venice it was well received, he added "The movie in Argentina was very well received and we go in the first weeks more tickets sold than other important U.S. films."

The director is very happy to see that the public still wants to be surprised about movies then according to him this is not an easygoing film, it's very challenging and demanding therefore the complicity of the public is key.

"I'm passionate to make films because the movie should be like a roller-coaster where you fast your seatbelts and you let yourself go, if this is not happening after five minutes you are out of the movie," Trapero underlined. Endit