Real-life equivalent?

There's a 2007 documentary called "Surfwise" that features a somewhat similar family but in a surfing community. Big family that lives fairly off the grid in a camper, father is very rigid in his ideologies, homeschooled kids, ardent adherence to physical fitness, etc.

The director and producer (Matt Ross) said he based the story on his own childhood based in a commune.

Check out the movie/documentary THE WOLF PACK

PARK CITY, Utah — It’s quite a tale: Seven children, all with waist-length hair, are raised on welfare in a messy four-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And they are almost never allowed to leave the house. For years.

Their father has the only key to the front door, and he keeps it locked. In some years, they are allowed outside only a handful of times. In others, not at all.

The kicker is that the story is true — and all but one of the children still live there.

“The Wolfpack,” making its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival here on Sunday, is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction documentaries that come along on the rare occasion a filmmaker happens to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. In 2010, Crystal Moselle, the film’s director, bumped into six of the Angulo siblings — boys, then aged about 11 to 18 — on one of their rare trips outside and befriended them.

Eventually, they allowed her to bring a camera inside the apartment. “I was their first friend, and I think they were as fascinated by me as I was by them,” Ms. Moselle said. “Slowly their mom warmed up. The dad was definitely a roller coaster.”

Lending extra resonance to “The Wolfpack,” particularly at Sundance, is one detail in particular. When they were not being home schooled by their mother, the boys — Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krisna and Jagadesh — and their sister, Visnu, were allowed to watch movies nonstop, on DVDs bought at a discount or borrowed from the library.

Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese gave them a window to the world (a warped one in some cases but a window nonetheless) and injected badly needed doses of creativity into their lonely, claustrophobic lives.

“It’s fascinating what the human spirit does when it’s confined,” Ms. Moselle said. “The downside to all the movies — and they have seen, like, 5,000 — is that there are certain formulas to them. Real life is different. In real life, the girl doesn’t always break your heart. The boys are still struggling to understand that.”

A representative for “The Wolfpack” said members of the Angulo family did not wish to be interviewed ahead of the Sundance premiere.

I know of a community like this although they perhaps are not so extreme. There is one in Denmark called Christiania ironically. Well maybe not so ironic since Christians are liberal in Europe.

Not as extreme as this family, but I kept being reminded of my own brother while watching this movie. He raised his kids in a slightly similar way to Viggo's character in essence, although they did attend school. Their early years were in a commune type household in the woods, and my brother was into honest talking to children, like in this film, and hated fast food and the consumer society. They lived more conventionally than the family in this film, but yes, my brother shared many of the Viggo father's values in raising his kids.