Four generations of a family live crowded together in a shantytown shack in the squalor of inner-city Rome. Patriarch-slumlord Giacinto has money from an accident settlement, but doesn’t share it with his family; when he starts spending it on a sex worker, his wife and sons plot against him.

Winner of the Best Director award in Cannes, Ettore Scola’s chronicle of one of the most callous of families in cinema is an amusing yet piercing insight into the slums of Rome. Grotesque and crude, yet strangely endearing at times, this satirical comedy also contains tragic social undertones.