Thirty years ago, his father built the camper-van (casa rodante in Spanish) we see in the movie, and during their holidays Trapero’s family spent years travelling to remote corners of Argentina in the van.

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 bombshell 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 was born in Buenos Aires in 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).

4 STARS OUT OF 5

Nov. 2015: back in stock.

Below are scans from the UK dvd. Useful to look at the back cover for details such as subtitles and special features sometimes missed in the text above. Time and again 'product descriptions' are wrong or are missing crucial information so it's really worth checking the scans below. If subtitles aren't mentioned on the back cover then they won't be on the Dvd. Click on each for bigger scans.

Condition: New - still sealed. More details here.