Los niños lobo
2020 · 18m · Cuba
Directed by Otávio Almeida
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In Cuba, 60 years after the Revolution, two adolescent brothers living with their father, a veteran of the Angolan war, inhabit their own dystopian universe of war games; while innocence loses ground, their father's ghosts distance them from reality and lead them into a future full of uncertainties.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent, sure—war-haunted kids, inherited trauma, the whole thing—but it swims in exactly the pool everyone expects it to. The premise doesn't surprise; it confirms.
Almeida situates *Los niños lobo* in a lineage of post-revolutionary cinema that interrogates inherited violence through the domestic sphere, and the formal restraint—the way he lets diegetic sound and spatial composition carry the ideological weight—marks a filmmaker aware of exactly what tradition he's extending.
The film hinges on a single recurring choice: the decision to keep the father absent or barely-present in frame while his influence saturates every moment, and that restraint—never showing the ghost directly—does more to manifest haunting than any exposition could.