Locked away from the outside world in a Manhattan apartment, the Angulo siblings satisfy their curiosity, imagination and need to explore by re-enacting their favorite movies.

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The Wolfpack documentary is about six kids who live in New York, who see New York every day, but had never experienced New York or anywhere outside their apartment. The one and only thing they have been doing to get information about the outside world is watching over 5,000 movies on DVD over and over again. Reenacting the movie is how they learned to socialize as if one day they will have a chance to go out – they did, the filmmakers document the entire process of the family unlocking themselves step by step.  

This film, directed by Crystal Moselle, won the 2015 U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, is probably one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. It’s amazingly shot even though it doesn’t have any fancy shots, there are even jump cuts, the shaky hand shot and on camera zoom. Besides the story itself, the editing of this documentary is what makes it a much stronger piece of work.

Throughout the documentary, we see that the Angulo kids escape from the “cage,” they walk on the street, go to the beach, watch a movie in an actual theater the first time in their life. Their dad was furious about the kids talking to people from “outside”, but later we see him gradually convinced by his children to accept what they do. By the end as they all go out — after locking themselves up in the apartment for almost 15 years, the kids moved into their own apartment,  like their father says, “we’ll do better, that’s what I feel, and I see.”  

Official Trailer: (full movie is available on Netflix)

http://www.magpictures.com/thewolfpack/

You can watch more clips (the Grand Budapest Hotel one is pretty great.) they made on the website above ˆˆˆˆˆˆ, or purchase a Blu-ray DVD to support this incredible movie. Click on “watch on demand” it will show you all the sites that you can go to watch the full movie. 

24:08-– My favorite shot (24:46-25:08). One of the Angulo kids dressed up as Batman, stands by the fences window that separates him from the outside world. “Because it felt like another world… I did everything I could to make that world come true, to escape my world,” he says. It’s an incredibly depressing shot that him, as “Batman”, is not able to do what Batman can do. But he fully believes that one day, he can go into his dream world without having any fear of his dad, though he knows it’s impossible at that point. This shot is not only visually breathtaking, but it slows the story down and creates a more cinematic moment to a documentary film, and it also makes the audience more curious about the unanswered question — do they go out eventually?

27:40-28:55– The first time one of them escapes, here the pace becomes super fast and random, which excellently create the chaos of the city to the 15-year-old boy who sees and experience the different world he had dreamed about. 

1:15:53-the end– The ending that we finally see all their family members are a part of the “outside world”, either for the first time or again, their reaction, especially their mom’s, is priceless.

I also think it’s an excellent choice to put the film that the kids made at the end. Because those kids were acting as others in the movie to think how they’re going to fit themselves in the world, and now they created a film that they can play themselves, doing things they see fit to interact with the outside world.

As I mentioned in my last post, it takes the time to get access to your subject; however, sometimes there’s no time to think before you capture a moment, an iconic moment, and that is what street photographers do every day. This documentary from 2013, “Everybody Street”, reveals the lives and work of iconic New York street photographers, including Magnum photographers Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt and Bruce Gilden.

Taking photos on the street is unpredictable and challenging, a moment may be gone if you make your decision a second later, you might return with no good pictures, or even put yourself in danger. In this trailer, at 00″57, Bruce Gilden got yelled and pushed by a lady as he’s taking a photo of her. As Gilden is known for photographing extremely close to his subject, with flash, which usually weirds people out, but it doesn’t stop him from getting closer and closer.

This documentary features interviews with 13 photographers and two historians, as they explain how they get to go out and get their work done, how they feel about their “job” and what motives them to continue doing it. What inspires me in this documentary is when Boogie talks about his experience of photographing gangsters and drug addicts, “For me, it’s becoming what you’re shooting, you have to get into their heads… …Some lines shouldn’t be crossed, what are those lines? The deeper you go, the better pictures you’ll take.” This has always been a struggle for me when I’m at the point to decide whether I should go further to get hopefully more out of the subject, but spend more time and might put myself in danger, or be satisfied with the legitimate shots, and I have never chosen the latter.

Same as taking photos, what we see and learned from those 13 photographers can also apply to video making, the deeper you go, the better story you will get. Making a good documentary work is time-consuming, which means 1-hour shooting doesn’t equal to 1 hour of usable footage. Those photos we see in the “Everybody Street” are only one or two out of thousands of everything they photographed that day; they’re not there at the exact moment when the perfect moment happened. Same with video, the more you shoot, the more choices you will have later for editing, there is never enough, or too much footage. Sometimes when we find a perfect background for a shot, we will just have to wait for someone to come in. Always be bold to interact with strangers, if you don’t feel and make it looks weird, they won’t feel it’s strange that you’re pointing the camera at them, and small talks usually help to get people open up.

Besides the “Everybody Street”, another two examples I’d like to add along with this post are the “City of God” (a 2002 fiction movie), and Eric Kim’s blog. The City of God is about the journey of a young photojournalist of how he got his first camera from his gangster friend, to become a successful photojournalist. And Eric’s blog is a fantastic source to acquire knowledge of anything about photography, techniques, equipment reviews, and recommendations, encouraging notes from other great photographers, etc.