Tonight ABC 20/20 profiles The Wolfpack , a shocking new documentary that tells the tale of the Angulo brothers who were locked inside of a four-bedroom New York City apartment for most of their lives. Their story became a documentary when film director Crystal Moselle happened to see the Angulo brothers walking the streets of NYC. As she listened to the Angulo brothers tell their story, instinctively she knew that she had the makings for an incredibly moving documentary. The Wolfpack was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. Here is how the film director described seeing the pack of brothers for the first time:
“I met these boys about three blocks from this very theater. My instincts took over and I ran after them. They were all in black and their hair was long and it was just a beautiful sight… It almost felt as if I had discovered a long lost tribe, except it was not from the edges of the world but from the streets of Manhattan… It’s just such an amazing experience to now be like, ‘Oh, our movie is playing at the theater that we walked by every day.’ I’m a Lower East Side girl, and I moved to Brooklyn just a few years ago. It feels like home and it feels perfect.”
The Angulo brothers are six boys named Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krisna, and Jagadesh, as well as one sister named Visnu. According to a previous Inquisitr article, the children all grew up in an isolated environment inside their apartment in Lower Manhattan with their parents. For the most part, no one knew the children existed since they rarely made public appearances. Homeschooled by their mother, the children had no outside friends.
Director Crystal Moselle gained the trust of the family and was allowed to enter the home, where she learned that the boys learned basically everything they knew from watching thousands of movies—all sort of movies. Their Peruvian father, Oscar, who suffered from severe paranoia and alcoholism, insisted that the children never enter certain rooms in the house for fear they would be heard by the neighbors. In his mind, he was not an abusive parent but a protective parent, one that kept them away from the bad influences of the outside world.
The Angulo brothers also created a fantasy world that allowed them to make their own props and costumes to imitate the characters in the movies. Despite their upbringing, Crystal Moselle found the boys to be extremely delightful and “wide-eyed” about life.
This is what makes the documentary so profound and compelling. Tune in tonight to ABC 20/20 at 10/9c to see how Crystal Moselle infiltrated the Angulo brothers’ world and found an intensely deep human story behind the scenes.
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