GERMANY
Reuters

BY MICHAEL RODDY
BERLIN Mon Feb 9, 2015

Feb 9 (Reuters) – A Chilean film showing defrocked priests protected by the Catholic Church and a Guatemalan film about the hard lives of Mayan coffee farmers are making waves at the Berlin film festival.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain made “The Club” after he realised some paedophile priests had collaborated with the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet or were ordinary criminals, and had never paid for their misdeeds.

“The Catholic Church for decades really has been spiriting away those priests, hiding them, shielding them from the public sphere,” he told a news conference on Monday to loud applause.

“That’s how we came up with this ‘club’, the idea of a club of lost priests.”

The film focuses on four priests living in a fishing village whose cosy lifestyle is shattered by the arrival of a priest trailed by a…