Gianfranco Rosi Retrospective: El Sicario, Room 164 + Q&A

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Gianfranco Rosi.

El Sicario is a specialist in kidnappings, torture, and contract killings. For a number of years, he was a unit commander with the Mexican state police and he even completed training with the FBI. He has killed hundreds of people while working for Mexican drugs cartels over two decades, but has never been apprehended.

Gianfranco Rosi's documentary joins El Sicario when he is in hiding with $250,000 reward on his head. With his face covered, the one and only protagonist of Rosi's chilling film describes how the Mexican drugs mafia operates and how it is linked to corrupt policemen and state officials. The deliberately sparse style of the film, shot entirely in a hotel room on the US-Mexican border, serves to further augment the horror of this murderer's stories, while enabling viewers to gain an insight into the psychology and working methods of a university-educated contract killer.

El Sicario, Room 164, dir. Gianfranco Rosi, Italy/France 2010, 84 mins