Among Wolves
Gerardo Olivares films the case of Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja, handed over to a goatherd as a child and left alone in the Sierra Morena for twelve years.
Simply told, visually sumptuous take on a boy's years spent living alone in the Spanish wild in the 1960s.
Marcos is seven when his father hands him to an old goatherd in the Sierra Morena in settlement of a debt. The man dies within the year and the boy stays on alone in the hills for more than a decade, sheltering in a cave, learning what the animals eat, and falling in with a wolf pack that tolerates him. Olivares tells it with very little dialogue, because for most of those years Marcos has no one to talk to.
Critics took it as plain, unhurried storytelling rather than a study in hardship, and gave most of the credit to the animal photography; Olivares came to the film from wildlife documentary and shoots the mountain as a working ecology rather than a wilderness. Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja himself appears briefly.
The part that holds a clinician is the return. The Civil Guard recovers Marcos at nineteen and puts him back into a society he has no words for, and the difficulty turns out to be the coming back rather than the mountain. Abandonment, attachment formed with whatever is available, and the long cost of a childhood spent outside language all sit near the surface.
Details
- 2010
- Spain
- Spanish
- Film
- Goya Best New Actor 2011 nominated
Why it is on this list
The best known European case of a child raised outside human society, filmed without the sensationalism the subject usually attracts. The record exists at all because Gabriel Janer Manila, then a doctoral student in anthropology, recorded Marcos telling it in 1975 and later wrote it as the novel He jugado con lobos, which is also in this library. Rodriguez Pantoja died in August 2026, aged 80.