Meet the Children who Never Lleft their NYC Home for 14 Years

 

Six brothers and their sister who never left their home for 14 years because of their paranoid father who believed that New York would contaminate them. The children had to learn everything they know from watching over 5,000 movies, UK Daily Mail reveals.

The Angulo siblings - Bhagavan, 23, twins Govinda and Narayana, 22, Mukunda, 20, Krisna, 18, Jagadesh, 17, and their sister Visnu - lived with their parents on welfare in a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Their father, Oscar, kept the only key and the door was always locked. They were Home-schooled by their mother, the siblings found an outlet watching movies which gave them an insight of outside world.

 

The lives of the Angulo family became the subject of film, The Wolfpack, from director Crystal Moselle. 

 

The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah last month. The six brothers and their mother Susanne also attended the premiere. Their sister, Visnu, who is the eldest and suffers developmental challenges, did not attend. 

 

The story emerged in 2010, when Ms Moselle met one of the brothers - then aged between 11 and 18 years old - on a rare escape into the outside world.

 

She described first seeing them, on First Avenue, when they were all walking in a 'pack', wearing sunglasses and with their long hair blowing. Their look had been inspired by Reservoir Dogs.

 

Ms Moselle said: '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.' 

 

The filmmaker befriended the boys, slowly earned the family's trust and was invited into their sheltered world, bringing her camera with her.

 

Ms Moselle said that boy's mother, Susanne Angulo, slowly opened up to her but that the father, was a 'rollercoaster'.

 

The brother says: 'After I saw the Dark Knight, that made me believe that something was possible to happen. Not because it was Batman, it’s because it felt like another world. 

 

'I did everything I could to make that world come true. To escape my world.' 

In all they had watched about 5,000 movies which were rented or bought cheaply. 

 

                                  The parents of the children

Finally, one of the brothers escapes the home, and the clan is forced to readjust and begin taking their first steps into society.