Narayana Angulo remembers a year when he didn’t leave his Lower East Side home at all.  In fact, he and his five brothers, now in their late teens and early 20s, say they spent a good part of 12 years inside in their family’s low-income apartment on Delancey St. They’re the subject of “The Wolfpack,” a documentary opening Friday that shows their life inside, and out of, the home.  But contrary to what’s been depicted in press materials, the brothers have not “spent their entire lives locked away from society.”  Some of the elder boys spent part of their early childhood in California and West Virginia. Once in New York, they were taken on summer outings to Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History and the World Trade Center by their mother, Susanne, who homeschooled them in the four-bedroom LES apartment they moved into in 1996.  “We had a station wagon and were traveling a lot before we wound up in New York,” says Govinda Angulo, 22, who is Narayana’s twin.  Their father, Oscar Angulo, came from Peru without a green card. He wanted to control his six sons and their older sister, who is mentally disabled.  Oscar wanted to have “a tight family, I guess like he had himself,” says Narayana.  Their dad possessed the only keys to the apartment. He insisted his kids not cut their hair.  Oscar refuses to work. Susanne, a former hippie who met Oscar on the Machu Picchu trail in the 1980s, received checks for homeschooling her sons. That, Govinda and Narayana say, paid for groceries, books and DVDs.  “And VHS tapes!” they add.  That was crucial, because the boys would spend long periods indoors doing re-creations of favorite films, including “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Dark Knight.”  But one by one, they began to sneak out of the apartment, which in the film is shown as cozy but cramped.  In 2010, on their first night out as a group, they caught the eye of Crystal Moselle, a former School of Visual Arts student and aspiring filmmaker.  “I was walking down First Ave. and these boys ran past me,” says Moselle, who came to call them “The Wolfpack.”  “They were all dressed in black, with long hair. I instinctually ran after them to talk. They asked what I did. When I told them, they said they’re interested in filmmaking, too.”  In fact, some of the equipment Moselle shot the film on was from a production facility where Govinda — an aspiring cinematographer — had freelanced.  Moselle captures the first time the brothers see a movie in a theater (“The Fighter,” in 2011). Their sense of excitement and transgression is endearing.  The documentary shows them at Coney Island, on jaunts in their neighborhood and exploring their limits.  Though “The Wolfpack” won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, some questioned whether the brothers’ reclusiveness was as presented.  “Everything is real,” says Moselle. “We’re not saying they were [shut-ins], but they’d be in the house their entire school year.  “Their situation fostered such a creativity in them — that’s the heart of it. How their imagination ran free.”  Narayana, a budding activist for anti-fracking causes, remembers long periods of being cut off.  “There were some years we didn’t go outside at all,” he says. “Especially after 9/11, that sort of proved a point to my dad. We’d gone to the towers just prior to that. He said, ‘That might have been us.’ So for like a year after that, we never went outside.”  The New York presented by their father was, to their cinephile eyes, like a cross between “Seven” and “Taxi Driver.”  Oscar did accept that his sons would eventually go to college. “That’s sort of counterintuitive to how he raised us, I know,” says Govinda, who spent a semester at a college in San Francisco.  He’s now a working cinematographer, with an apartment in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The rest of his siblings still live with their father and mother on Delancey St.  Though sophisticated and erudite, the Angulo boys still have a rift with their gruff father, who, Moselle says, valued the documentary as a way to understand his sons’ point of view.  Moselle is also helping the brothers start a company, Wolfpack Pictures. As for the buzz on the film, Govinda, who had the most time on the outside, says, “No publicity is bad publicity.”
"The Wolfpack" tells the story of the six Angulo brothers who spent much of 12 years cooped up in their Delancey St. apartment.