The Wolfpack

Seven children grow up in a housing project apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Their father keeps the door locked, and in some years nobody goes outside at all. Everything the six brothers know about the world comes from the films they watch, and they remake those films at home: transcribing the dialogue by ear, building costumes from boxes and yoga mats, cutting guns out of cardboard. What the documentary finds is not confinement but cinema standing in for the world. The brothers learned the outside through Tarantino and Nolan, and when they first walk into the street they do it dressed as those films. Crystal Moselle directed. It began in the spring of 2010 when six long-haired boys ran past her on First Avenue and she followed them and introduced herself. The shooting spread over years. The film took the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance in 2015. The family's own camera archive is folded into the film, and it is the strongest material in it. Who it is for: anyone who likes strange relationships with cinema and family-portrait documentaries. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for accountability. The father speaks in the film but the question of responsibility stays veiled, the mother's position is not opened up enough, and the one sister is barely present.