Film ReviewsThe Wolfpack
Jul 17, 2015 Anchorage Press
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Crystal Moselle was at the right place at the right time. The filmmaker was standing on a bustling Manhattan street when six young men with similar clothes and long hair, like carbon copies of one another, passed her by. The human train immediately piqued Moselle's interest and she swiftly chased after it. She became the Angulo brothers' first friend and established a long and trusting relationship with the family that granted her access to its story. The Wolfpack tells of the Angulo family's secluded existence smack in the middle of one of the world's busiest and densest metropolis.
Viewers may find it unthinkable that on the 16th floor of a housing project in lower Manhattan, which houses 800 people, there is an apartment that is about 1,000 square feet, in which seven children were raised with almost no contact with the outside world. Oscar Angulo, the father, was the keeper of his nine-member family in this six-room apartment. He held the only keys and restricted the kids' use to those spaces that did not share walls with neighboring units. This allocation of space further shrunk the kids' world and excluded the living room and one of the bedrooms. The Wolfpack is compelling and avoids many of the pitfalls other works in the documentary genre have a tendency to fall into. For one, it never objectifies the Angulo family, perhaps this is because the documentary uses material provided by the family and allows the boys to tell their story using their own voices and points of views, and also creates newer material along with the boys. The collaboration between the boys and the filmmaker delivers The Wolfpack with a palpable degree of honesty and compassion because even as the boys grow into men and recognize how mistaken their father's actions were, they show restraint and mercy by being rightfully critical but never vilifying him to a degree that viewers may.
The Wolfpack raises many questions, and viewers may struggle to comprehend the nature of people in general and what the real impact of one's environment is on shaping values and ethics. The boys, Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda, and Narayana are distinctly individual even if they grew up in exactly identical circumstances, once out into the world they blossom in different directions. The eldest is Vishnu, the girl, who does not feature prominently in the documentary. Vishnu was the only one of the bunch with a room of her own. She was born with Turner Syndrome, a chromosomal condition that affects development and is found in one out 2,500 females worldwide. The story of Susanne, the boy's mother, is especially moving because not only did she bear the brunt of Oscar's rules, but she is similar to a bird who has had its wings clipped and is put in a cage after experiencing the delights of flight and freedom. And Susanne's cage was hardly gilded, they lived on welfare and her income from homeschooling her children; in 2009 when Oscar covered the windows with blankets the cage became a cave.
To escape the realities of the cave, the Angulo boys watched thousands of movies. The movies shaped the boys' perception of reality and human relationships. The boys reenacted their favorite movies scene by scene, and line by line, making props and costumes from household items and passing the time until, after 14 years of seclusion, Makunda went out into the streets. There is an age-old story told by Plato as an allegory. It goes something like this: There were some prisoners shackled together in a subterranean cave. They sat facing a wall. Behind them was a roaring fire that illuminated the wall. All that the prisoners could see were the shadows on the wall. Sometimes people would walk between their backs and the fire carrying cut outs of things found in nature, like trees. The prisoners' perception of a tree came from the shadows on the wall. Their entire perception of reality was based on shadows. One day one of the prisoners got out and went to the surface. There he saw a tree, and realized that what he thought was tree in the cave was only a shadow imitating a tree. Once experience was gained, there was no going back into the cave. The prisoner returned to tell his fellow companions that what they were seeing were shadows and not reality, but they did not believe him and so he was forced to leave, lest he go back into a false perception of reality. The Angulo cave is poetically and tragically analogous to the Allegory of the Cave. But, there is one important difference, when Makunda stepped out of the cave, the others quickly followed, and together they shifted the power dynamic in their house, and like in a movie, they found the world was ready to receive them.
The Wolfpack shows on Monday, July 20 at 5:30 p.m. at Beartooth.
Viewers may find it unthinkable that on the 16th floor of a housing project in lower Manhattan, which houses 800 people, there is an apartment that is about 1,000 square feet, in which seven children were raised with almost no contact with the outside world. Oscar Angulo, the father, was the keeper of his nine-member family in this six-room apartment. He held the only keys and restricted the kids' use to those spaces that did not share walls with neighboring units. This allocation of space further shrunk the kids' world and excluded the living room and one of the bedrooms. The Wolfpack is compelling and avoids many of the pitfalls other works in the documentary genre have a tendency to fall into. For one, it never objectifies the Angulo family, perhaps this is because the documentary uses material provided by the family and allows the boys to tell their story using their own voices and points of views, and also creates newer material along with the boys. The collaboration between the boys and the filmmaker delivers The Wolfpack with a palpable degree of honesty and compassion because even as the boys grow into men and recognize how mistaken their father's actions were, they show restraint and mercy by being rightfully critical but never vilifying him to a degree that viewers may.
The Wolfpack raises many questions, and viewers may struggle to comprehend the nature of people in general and what the real impact of one's environment is on shaping values and ethics. The boys, Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda, and Narayana are distinctly individual even if they grew up in exactly identical circumstances, once out into the world they blossom in different directions. The eldest is Vishnu, the girl, who does not feature prominently in the documentary. Vishnu was the only one of the bunch with a room of her own. She was born with Turner Syndrome, a chromosomal condition that affects development and is found in one out 2,500 females worldwide. The story of Susanne, the boy's mother, is especially moving because not only did she bear the brunt of Oscar's rules, but she is similar to a bird who has had its wings clipped and is put in a cage after experiencing the delights of flight and freedom. And Susanne's cage was hardly gilded, they lived on welfare and her income from homeschooling her children; in 2009 when Oscar covered the windows with blankets the cage became a cave.
To escape the realities of the cave, the Angulo boys watched thousands of movies. The movies shaped the boys' perception of reality and human relationships. The boys reenacted their favorite movies scene by scene, and line by line, making props and costumes from household items and passing the time until, after 14 years of seclusion, Makunda went out into the streets. There is an age-old story told by Plato as an allegory. It goes something like this: There were some prisoners shackled together in a subterranean cave. They sat facing a wall. Behind them was a roaring fire that illuminated the wall. All that the prisoners could see were the shadows on the wall. Sometimes people would walk between their backs and the fire carrying cut outs of things found in nature, like trees. The prisoners' perception of a tree came from the shadows on the wall. Their entire perception of reality was based on shadows. One day one of the prisoners got out and went to the surface. There he saw a tree, and realized that what he thought was tree in the cave was only a shadow imitating a tree. Once experience was gained, there was no going back into the cave. The prisoner returned to tell his fellow companions that what they were seeing were shadows and not reality, but they did not believe him and so he was forced to leave, lest he go back into a false perception of reality. The Angulo cave is poetically and tragically analogous to the Allegory of the Cave. But, there is one important difference, when Makunda stepped out of the cave, the others quickly followed, and together they shifted the power dynamic in their house, and like in a movie, they found the world was ready to receive them.
The Wolfpack shows on Monday, July 20 at 5:30 p.m. at Beartooth.