Familia Rodante

Familia Rodante 8pm Tuesday 05.09.06

Dir: Pablo Trapero Argentina / Spain / Germany / Brazil / UK 2004 103 mins CLUB

Starring: Liliana Capurro, Graciana Chironi, Ruth Dobel, Federico Esquerro, Claudio Bernardo Forteza

Familia Rodante (Rolling Family), a moving road-movie about family relationships, is the latest film by the brilliant new Argentinian director Pablo Trapero, described recently in Le Monde as 'One of the revelations of the new century'.

Familia Rodante begins on the day of the 84th birthday celebration of Grandma Emilia, when her disparate family gathers to pay homage to their matriarch. They are unaware of the bomb-shell she’s about to drop: she’s been invited to be the matron of honour at her niece’s wedding in the remote village where she was brought up, over a thousand kilometres away from Buenos Aires, and expects them all to go with her. Unable to defend themselves against the heavy dose of emotional blackmail she lays on them, thirteen members of four generations of the same family cram into the back of an old camper van and set off.

In this confined space, as the days pass and the van hobbles its way towards its destination, emotions start to ride high and old grudges and jealousies start bubbling to the surface, along with well kept secrets and sexual tensions, new and past. Excruciating and hilarious in equal measure in its raw depiction of family politics, director Pablo Trapero’s own grandmother, a non-professional actress, plays the family matriarch lending the film reality, charm and sympathy.

Pablo Trapero (born Buenos Aires, 1971.) His previous feature films were Mundo Grúa (1999), (shown at the Venice Film Festival and which won the Critics Award) and El Bonaerense (2002), (shown in the Certain Regard at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival). Trapero also directed Naikor, a short film premiered in 2001, and Sarasa, a documentary for television (2002).