The Reel World: We are family
There are no typical families. Even happy families are unique (sorry, Tolstoy!) as you will find when you meet the Angulo brothers, the Mosher family and the White clan.
These three documentaries explore family dynamics in very different ways. Six brothers isolated in their New York City apartment finally taste freedom. A New York family is affected by generational trauma. The wacky White clan live without rules and pay the consequences.
Intimate, affecting and sometimes hilarious – just wait 'til you meet the White family – these documentaries are a perfect way to appreciate your own unique family.
Let’s put on a show! Slender and long-haired, the lookalike Angulo brothers don clever homemade costumes and gather their props. They’ve meticulously copied scripts from their pop culture favorites – Batman, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs – and now it’s time to film. The fake bullets can’t penetrate Batman’s yoga mat armor, but the brothers don’t let that stop them from acting their hearts out.
Homeschooled by their mother, the six Angulo brothers seldom left their apartment and created elaborate world-building fantasies to entertain themselves. Oscar Angulo, the boys’ father, believed “freedom” was keeping his children inside, away from drugs and crime. One year they never left their apartment at all. Some might see the Angulo home, a cramped apartment in the Lower Eastside, as a haven for creativity and imagination. Others could view the Angulo home as a prison.
The Wolfpack, a documentary directed by Crystal Moselle, follows the Angulo brothers as they take their first tentative forays into the outside world. Their first ride on a train. Their first dip in the ocean. Moselle captures the joy and exuberance as the boys finally experience a different kind of freedom.
Some families are haunted not by ghosts, but by their pasts. As the leaves turn, the snow falls and the weather warms in the Mohawk Valley of New York, the Mosher family reveals what haunts them in the affecting documentary October Country.
Patriarch Don Mosher, traumatized by his experiences in the Vietnam War, finds it difficult to connect emotionally with his family. Daughter Donna laments that her painful experiences with early pregnancy and domestic violence are being repeated by her own daughter Daneal. As for Daneal, she realizes she is repeating her mother’s patterns with men but is unable to change.
As the rhythms of the year cycle through, the Mosher family is remarkably candid about their losses: estranged siblings, fathers in prison and lost custody of children. Cemetery scenes and Halloween decorations add to the melancholic air, yet there is also laughter and love. “Family is everything,” Dottie Mosher says, and despite their ghosts, October Country is a portrait of a flawed yet loving family.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
It’s party time in Boone County, West Virginia. As the White clan gathers for matriarch Bertie Mae’s 85th birthday, revelers smoke pot, snort pills and wave genitalia. Oh, and there’s birthday cake too. For years, this exuberant, outrageous, rule-breaking family have been raising hell and having fun in the hills of West Virginia. They’re the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.
Murder. Fraud. Theft. Arson. Drug trafficking. Pick a crime and a member of the extended White family committed it (and will take pride in admitting it, too). Just in the one year of filming the documentary, one granddaughter is released from prison, a great grandson is sentenced for attempted murder and another granddaughter loses her newborn to CPS.
Both appalling and endearing, the White family are never boring. How many documentaries boast mountain dancing, crime scene photos and a hilarious soundtrack?
