While the Wolf's Away

1958. Children their families cannot manage are sent to a boarding institution. The rules are hard, the punishments heavy, and the people who run it answer to nobody. Alex realises something is wrong; children go missing and nobody asks. He plans an escape with a few friends. But as the plan proceeds the friendships are tested and who trusts whom becomes unclear. Joseph Hemsani Levy directs. Luis de la Rosa plays Alex. The production is Mexican. The narrative is not a story of childhood but a thriller; the institution is built as a zone of threat and none of the adults can be trusted. The choice of period is functional: at the end of the fifties institutions like this went unsupervised and what happened inside was invisible from outside. The film shows that without stating it. The visual style is dark and narrow; corridors, locked rooms and night sections carry most of the narrative. It is a film carried by child actors, and the cast largely bears the weight. Its limit is the script; the narrative speeds up as the secret is resolved and some links are left open. Who it is for: viewers who like Latin American thrillers and narratives set in closed institutions. Who it is not for: the subject is uncomfortable, some of the suspense stays inside genre convention, and the ending is rushed.