El Club

DIRECTOR: Pablo Larraín   COUNTRY: Chile   YEAR: 2015   LANGUAGE(S): Spanish   SUBTITLES: German   RUNNING TIME: 98 min  

SECTION: Previews at Cinecittà 2015

SYNOPSIS

A group of Catholic priests who have been outcast for committing various sins, such as sexual abuse, corruption, human trafficking or simply because they love men now live in a house on the sea, somewhere on the outskirts of a small Chilean village.

This club is dominated by silence, suppression, waiting. Instead of coming to terms with what they have done, the fallen priests train their greyhound and continue to live a strictly regimented life. This changes when a victim of abuse turns up and makes loud accusations.

Director Pablo Larraín has made a very angry and complex psychological drama, whose washed-out images deliver a biting but increasingly bleak comment on the Catholic Church whose sole aim seems to be its own preservation. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Berlinale.

PABLO LARRAÍN
Pablo Larraín was born in Santiago de Chile in 1976. He studied film at the University for the Arts, Sciences and Communication in Santiago before cofounding the Fábula production company in 2005. In the same year he made his feature film debut with FUGA. He followed this with TONY MANERO (2007) which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2008, and Post Mortem which premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. His film NO! (2012) was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Lately he has been working as a producer and director on the HBO series Profugos.

FILMOGRAPHY
Fuga (2005), Tony Manero (2007), Post Mortem (2010), No! (2012), El Club (2015)

SCRIPT: Pablo Larraín, Guillermo Calderón, Daniel Villalobos   PRODUCER Juan De Dios Larraín   CAMERA: Sergio Armstrong   EDITOR: Sebastian Sepulveda   MUSIC: Mauricio Molina   CAST: Roberto Farias, Antonia Zegers, Alfredo Castro, Alejandro Goic

PRODUCTION: Fabula   WORLD SALES: Funny Balloons   GERMAN DISTRIBUTOR: Piffl Medien