As the father of the Puccio family, Arquímedes, takes a lunch plate upstairs, we get to see glimpses of their family life. He leaves wife Epifanía in the kitchen, pushes past his
son Alex lounging in the living room and checks in on his daughter Adriana, listening to music in her room.
Wearing a comfy-looking cardigan, silver-haired Arquímedes carefully takes the tray to the door at the end of the hall, unlocks and - instead of a bedridden relative, there's a hooded kidnap victim in the bathroom, rearing up in fear at the sudden light and sound.
"Quiet. It's the food," Arquímedes says, as he shuts the door on us, the audience. He's not wrong - it's just a plate of arroz con pollo (chicken rice) - as they're not about to let the victim starve before the ransom's come in.
The Clan, which is released in the UK on 16th September, tells the story of the well-to-do Pucci family, who lived in the upper-class Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro.
The Puccio Family
Arquímedes and wife Epifanía lived a comfortable life in their large house with their five children: Alejandro, Silvia, Daniel, Guillermo, and Adriana.
One of the boys, Alejandro (Alex) was a star rugby player who achieved fame throughout the country.
Like the other upstanding citizens in their social circle, they attended mass at the nearby cathedral every Sunday.
They owned a shop selling watersports equipment on the ground floor of their home, as well as a bar in the neighbouring building.
Their house was definitely one of the last places anyone thought to look for a kidnap victim.
The family's double life finally came to light during a police raid in August 1985, when they found businesswoman Nelida Bollini de Prado, was met with disbelief.
Bollini de Prado had been kidnapped a month before. Her ransom had been set for $500,000.
She was the luckiest of the Puccios' four hostages, as she was the only one to make it out of their house alive.
The first three victims, Ricardo Manoukian, Eduardo Aulet and Emilio Naum weren't so lucky.
The father's scheme to get rich
The Puccio family's efficient abductions were familiar to Argentines who'd lived through the Dirty War of 1974-1983.
Arquímedes himself was an ex-secret serviceman in the Secretariat of State Intelligence of Argentina.
He gained his forensic knowledge of the darker side of life during the military junta's rule, and was involved in los desaparecidos : disposing of the bodies of government enemies after torture and kidnapping.
The Clan's director, Pablo Trapero, told the BBC : "Arquimedes is not a crazy guy that decides to start kidnapping people out of the blue."
"He slowly became who he was within the Argentine political context.
"He was a symptom of that time."
As the dictatorship came to its end in the eary 1980s, Puccio, along with some accomplices, created a new “business”: they would kidnap people from rich families, demand ransom pretending to be a communist terrorist group.
Their kidnapping had a particularly twist, though, inspired by their years working on the shadowy fringes of a brutal military regime: once they got the ransom, they would still execute their hostages.
The victims
Two of the four known victims, Ricardo Manoukian and Eduardo Aulet, were friends of Alex Puccio. The third, Emilio Naum was killed during the kidnapping attempt as he resisted.
Rugby player Ricardo Manoukian was lured to the house by his teammate Alex, and kept there for nine days. After his ransom of $250,000 was paid, he was killed by three gunshots to the neck.
Arquímedes scaled back his price for the second victim, engineer Eduardo Aulet. This time, he wanted $100,000. When the sum was paid by the Aulet's family, he was also shot dead.
Businessman Emilio Naum died in a struggle with members of the clan as they were trying to abduct him. He was shot dead and his body left in the street.
Businesswoman Nelida Bollini de Prado was the only one who survived, after police grew suspicious and raided the Puccio home.
This time, Arquímedes had tried to be too clever. When calling her family to demand the ransom, he tried to make both them and the hostage believe that she was being kept in the countryside.
He placed bales of grass around her, played a cassette of wild birds singing waved a fan to simulate the breeze.
A phone company employee first raised the alarm that these calls sounded suspicious, tipping off police and saving Nelida Bollini de Prado's life.
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