New issue of Port delves into the fantasy world of documentary The Wolfpack

The new issue of Port hits newsstands today with its first ever split cover, shared between actor Benicio del Toro and a limited edition run featuring one of the brothers from The Wolfpack. Following on from Crystal Moselle’s documentary, which picked up the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, a full feature and photo essay in issue 17 of Port delves into the fantasy world of the six Angulo brothers, who, imprisoned by their father for 14 years, turned to his extensive movie collection for escape. Port sent photographer Stefan Ruiz to their Manhattan apartment to shoot the many costumes and props they’d made over the years, using cereal boxes, paper and tape to painstakingly recreate the films they lived vicariously through.

Here we share an extract from Mukunda Angulo’s first person account in Port and a selection of published and unpublished images.

The earliest memory I have is making a drum set for Ringo Starr of The Beatles, for Magical Mystery Tour. In the movie, I’m playing drums with pens. I have little cymbals. I made that entire drum set.

Our entire film reenactment process works by us all watching a film and, if we love it, we start coming together as a group and go: “Who should we play?” “Which characters do we fit?” When all our characters are confirmed and discussed then we start to write everything out. We write out the entire script by hand. We love doing it by hand; it feels more organic, instead of typing it out.

All the props and costumes are made out of cereal box cardboard, paper, scotch tape – some duct tape as well – and paper bags. Leather Face’s mask is made out of a paper bag but his hair is made out of paper coloured black. When you have nothing else to do you look around for resources. We’d look around the place, put bits and pieces together, see what we could make of it.

My Batman costumes are one of the number one priorities. One of the costumes took over three years to make. It’s sweaty as hell, but when you see how it looks on film you can’t help but smile and think, ‘I did a good job. Three years paid off.’ A lot of times I remade props and costumes for reenactments, but other times I’d just make stuff because I was bored, or I would have an image in my head and I wanted to see what it looks like, what it feels like to hold.

I believe movies helped us gain a structured plan for our lives. Whenever we’d go out on our own we’d have no idea where we were, no idea what we wanted to do for the day, so we would use references from movies: get a slice of pizza, go to a movie, go to the park. – Mukunda Angulo, as told to Port.