El Sicario, Room 164

Director: Gianfranco Rosi

2010 / 80min / DCP

Wearing a black cowl for anonymity, a Mexican former hitman, seated in a hotel room “on the border US/Mexico” where once he’d plied his bloody trade, sits down to describe in detail the inner mechanisms of the cartels for whom he worked for 20 years: the various techniques of torture, learned via police academy training; the hand-in-glove relations between cartels, cops, and pliant government officials; the implacable spread of corruption and iniquity. Quite unlike anything else in Rosi’s oeuvre in its claustrophobic focus, El Sicario, Room 164 stares unblinking into the void, and its mephitic, brimstone tang won’t soon leave your nostrils.

Distributor: Stemal Entertainment

Part of Gianfranco Rosi: Firmament of the Real