MISHA AND THE WOLVES

(NETFLIX)

If Holocaust survivor Misha Defonseca’s personal tale of escaping Nazi Germany as a child by being accepted into a protective pack of wolves — which she turned into a best-selling book — seems too astonishing to be true, here it’s put under a microscope that examines both its veracity and why people want to believe in it. “Misha and the Wolves is the story of a lie,” says filmmaker Sam Hobkinson. “When you make a documentary film about an untruth, you are inverting the form, turning it on its head. There is a fiction at the heart of your nonfiction film, and it releases a ton of formal and creative possibilities. I wanted to make a psychological thriller about belief, about how and why we believe the stories we are told, and it seemed this was the perfect story to do it with.”