Survivre Avec Les Loups (Surviving with Wolves)

This Véra Belmont movie based on a fictional autobiography by USA-based Belgian author Monique De Wael (aka Misha Defonseca) is definitively a “strange” movie as tells a “strange” story that’s hard to believe, the voyage makes little sense to me and it is a little difficult and disturbing to watch.

Perhaps because the controversy behind the book (to read about it go here) explains why when you’re watching this difficult movie the story seems quite unbelievable.

The movie tells about 8-years-old Jewish Misha, a girl that in 1941 travels from Belgium into Germany, Poland, and Ukraine searching for her parents. In her voyage she’s “adopted” by a pack of wolves.

As a movie it has very good cinematography with spectacular views of forests in winter and spring; also worth mention is the music by Emilie Simon. The young actress, Mathilde Goffart does a good job in her first role, but I needed a script that developed more and better her character.

The movie was screened in-competition at the Alice in the City section of the 2007 Cinema Rome Film Festival.

For some reason I feel that this movie could be interesting to those that love dogs, even when the story is sort of sad in that sense and actually are wolves, but this side of the story is truly compelling.

Still, I do not recommend this movie as to my eyes the screenplay was truly underdeveloped, spent too much time setting the background for Misha to do the traveling and not much telling about her voyage back home (that’s why I got the feeling that the voyage –and her transformation- made little sense).