General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Clan

The Clan (Spanish: El clan) is a 2015 Argentine-Spanish crime thriller directed by Pablo Trapero, based on the true case of the Puccio family, a respectable household from the San Isidro district of Buenos Aires that kidnapped and murdered wealthy neighbors for ransom in the early 1980s.¹^•² It stars Guillermo Francella as the patriarch Arquímedes Puccio and Peter Lanzani as his eldest son Alejandro, runs 108 minutes, and premiered in Argentina on 13 August 2015.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Directed by Pablo Trapero; screenplay by Trapero, Esteban Student, and Julian Loyola³
Production	Argentina-Spain coproduction (75% Argentina, 25% Spain); producers include Hugo Sigman, Matías Mosteirín, Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar, Esther García, and Trapero⁴^•³
Release	13 August 2015 in Argentina; 108 minutes; Spanish language¹^•³
Main cast	Guillermo Francella (Arquímedes Puccio), Peter Lanzani (Alejandro Puccio), Lili Popovich, Gastón Cocchiarale, Franco Masini²
Awards	Silver Lion for Best Director, Venice 2015; Goya for Best Iberoamerican Film; Silver Cóndor for Best Editing²^•⁵
Oscar submission	Argentina's official submission for the 2016 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar⁶
Box office	Nearly one million Argentine viewers in its first ten days⁷

Spoilers

Story and historical basis

The film is set in Argentina in the early 1980s, during the final years of the military dictatorship and the return to democracy. Arquímedes Puccio, an accountant with ties to the intelligence services of the dictatorship, leads a ring of extortion kidnappings from his house in San Isidro, involving his own children. Alejandro, the eldest, is a rugby player whose role is to identify victims among his wealthy friends. While the family maintains a facade of normality, with the mother cooking and the other children studying, the captives are held locked in the basement.¹

The case behind the film shocked Argentine society in the early 1980s. The first kidnapping in the series was that of Ricardo Manoukian, a young rugby player from greater Buenos Aires, taken on 22 July 1982; his family paid the demanded ransom of 250,000 US dollars and received his body with three bullets in the head.⁸ Trapero centered the film on the four cases, dated 1982 to 1985, for which the family was tried, while noting that other kidnappings connected to Arquímedes and the clan do not appear in the film.⁹ The Puccios kidnapped fellow residents of Buenos Aires, collected ransom, and killed their victims anyway, while outwardly presenting themselves as decent shopkeepers; the family was arrested in 1985.³^•¹⁰

Trapero said the criminal side of the story was reconstructed exactly as presented by witnesses in court, with the facts and names taken one to one from the documented record, including testimony about how the ransom handovers unfolded; the family's domestic life drew on accounts from neighbors, friends, and members of Alejandro's rugby team.¹¹

Production

Trapero began developing the project in 2007 and has said that the father-son relationship is what allows the story to evolve across the film.¹² The film was shot as a coproduction between Argentina and Spain, with the Spanish side led by El Deseo, the company of the Almodóvar brothers, alongside Telefónica Studios, and the Argentine companies Kramer & Sigman Films (K&S Films) and Matanza Cine.⁴^•³ The crew included cinematographer Julián Apezteguia, editor Alejandro Carrillo Penovi (sharing the editing credit with Trapero), production designer Sebastián Orgambide, and composer Sebastián Escofet.³

Francella, known in Argentina mainly for comedy, was asked by Trapero to play a film villain; the director drew partly on the book El Clan Puccio by Rodolfo Palacios during his research.¹³

Historical and political reading

The film places the family's crimes in the context of the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and specialized in "disappearing" suspected political opponents; Trapero makes clear that the climate of violence and corruption partly enabled Arquímedes's crimes, and that as the country moved toward democracy, suspicion around him grew.¹⁴ The Rotterdam festival synopsis describes the family's state of mind and methods as intimately related to the dictatorship, whose power structures persisted underground after the introduction of democracy in 1983.³

In a peer-reviewed comparison with Luis Ortega's El ángel (2018), the film scholar Mariano Paz of the University of Limerick argues that El clan historicizes the events on which it is based, situating the protagonists' actions within a context of political violence that enabled and facilitated them, drawing on Elizabeth Jelin's reflections on the analogy between family and state upheld by the repressive military regime.¹⁵ Alfredo Dillon, in a study of the criminal biopic, analyzes the film as an example of how the biopic genre intertwines an individual biography with national history, in dialogue with earlier film representations of the 1976-1983 dictatorship.¹⁶

Reception and awards

The film was a commercial event in Argentina: it had the strongest opening-day release ever recorded for an Argentine film in its home market,⁶ and within ten days of release had drawn nearly one million viewers.⁷ The INCAA yearbook for 2015 records it as the second most commercially successful Argentine film of the previous twenty years and the first of 2015.¹⁷

At the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, Trapero won the Silver Lion for Best Director.² The film went on to win the Goya Award for Best Iberoamerican Film in Spain, and in Argentina received Silver Cóndor awards for Best New Actor (Lanzani) and Best Editing (Trapero and Carrillo Penovi).² IMDb lists 15 wins and 38 nominations overall, including a nomination for the Golden Lion at Venice and the Platform Prize at Toronto.⁵ Critics frequently compared its tone to Martin Scorsese's gangster films; French critics noted the pop soundtrack and long takes set against the horror of the household, and the Hollywood Reporter called it "slightly uneven but undeniably transporting."¹⁸^•¹⁹

Ten years after its release, the INCAA held a tribute screening of the film at the Cine Gaumont in Buenos Aires.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of political, royal, military, and criminal figures › Criminal and outlaw biopics

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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