Film Shot In Buffalo To Premiere This Week

BUFFALO, NY (Oct. 27, 2020) — “The True Adventures of Wolfboy” is a heart-wrenching and unique new film about a young boy with congenital hypertrichosis, causing excess hair growth on his face and body.

Paul is played by Jaeden Martell, already a veteran young actor with memorable credits like “St. Vincent,” “It” and “Knives Out.” He delivers a heartbreaking performance as an outcast, bullied by his peers and misunderstood by his dad (Chris Messina), who tries his best to help his young son deal with his differences by exuding confidence and dignity.

This approach doesn’t work, and Paul runs away to find the mother he’s never known, taking up with a group of other people who don’t quite belong.

Director Martin Krejcí said as an immigrant from Prague, he related to Paul’s experience of feeling like an outcast. “When I moved my family to the U.S. eight years ago, I arrived as an outsider. The cultural differences, my obvious accent and feelings of loneliness were things I struggled with daily,” Krejc said. “I found myself in Olivia Dufault’s script through my familiarity with Paul’s feelings. While our struggles are vastly different, these obstacles were like my own ‘uncontrollable hair,’ so to speak.”

For that reason, the director said anyone can relate to the main characters’ plight. “I wanted to reflect on what I personally connected to in Olivia's text,” he said. “The fact that this is a realistic story in many ways means that everyone with an open mind will be able to find themselves within it.”

Dufault, a Sarah Lawrence College graduate and seasoned playwright, makes her feature film debut with “Wolfboy.”

“Olivia's script twists the familiar outsider tale about accepting the world and the world accepting you with an unusual charge that evokes a realization inside the viewer's mind: we all have moments where we feel like outsiders, isolated and misunderstood. Yet, those subjective feelings of loneliness can bring people together when you realize that we all share these feelings and common struggles.”

Martell plays a young person in pain with the natural bent of an actor twice his age, giving depth to his character far beyond his unique appearance.

Ultimately, the oddball adventure film set entirely in upstate New York is about how meaningful acceptance can be when you’re young. “I wanted to make ‘Wolfboy’ for younger audiences,” Krecj said. “The clever and thoughtful, those with an open heart and mind.”

Vertical Entertainment will distribute the film Oct. 30, giving credit to the Buffalo Niagara Film Commission, Mayor Brown, the police and fire departments, “and especially, the people of Buffalo.”