GERMANY
Straits Times
BERLIN (AFP) – An explosive film by acclaimed Chilean director Pablo Larrain about paedophile priests given refuge from justice by the Roman Catholic Church sent a jolt through the Berlin film festival Monday.
A drama with tinges of black comedy, The Club tells the story of five former clerics and a nun living together in a seaside town in a kind of purgatory for their sins.
When Father Lazcano moves in, a drunk and dishevelled man comes to the gate of the home and shouts in graphic detail about how the clergyman repeatedly raped him as a child.
One of the other priests hands Father Lazcano a gun “to fire in the air and scare him off”. Thus begins a scandal that threatens to expose the small colony of exiles from the Church, before a Vatican emissary is dispatched to deal with the affair.
A brutal cover-up ensues but a remarkable twist at the end reveals the hurdles to escaping worldly justice.
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