In this stranger-than-fiction doco, we meet six brothers who have spent their entire lives locked by their father into their Manhattan apartment – where they watch movies obsessively and film their own ingenious re-enactments.
It has been a while since I’ve seen something that demands to be talked about with such urgency… It’s impossible not to have opinions.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2015
The Wolfpack 2015
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The winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, Crystal Moselle’s film delves into the bizarrely sheltered lives of six brothers whose father has confined them (and their sister) since birth to the tiny rooms of their Lower East Side apartment. What these boys know about social interaction they’ve learned from watching movies – thousands of them – and filming ingenious, homemade re-creations of their favourites. (Reservoir Dogs looms large: it offers each of them a major role.) Moselle draws on a vast video archive of their housebound lives to delight and disturb us in equal measure, but her portrait is a gently hopeful one, capturing them at a moment when the tyrannical grip of their father is faltering and they are making tentative forays into the world outside.
“The Wolfpack indeed has much to say about fandom, the reciprocal bonds between consumption and production, the nightmarish consequences of unchecked patriarchy, and, especially, the pathological evils of insularity (it may be one of the greatest films ever made on this theme).” — Blake Williams, Cinema Scope