Entrelobos (2010)

Seven-year-old Marcos and his older brother tend sheep to help their parents, tenant farmers for a wealthy landowner in the Sierra Morena mountains of Spain. A wolf attack kills five goats. Already deeply in debt, Marcos’s father fears being thrown out of his job and home, so he resolves the problem by giving his young son to the landowner. The landowner sends Marcos to work as a shepherd’s helper in a very remote part of the mountains, where Atanasio, a solitary old shepherd living in a cave, tends a flock. Atanasio teaches Marcos how to hunt, treat himself with plants, and coexist with the wolves that roam the mountains, which are also a refuge for insurgent rebels pursued by the Civil Guard and protected by Solale. But one day the old shepherd dies, leaving Marcos alone. He manages to survive and tames the pack of wolves. When the landowner’s men come looking for the rebels and to check on the flock, they find no one because Marcos is hiding, and they take the sheep away. Marcos then spends many long years cut off from the world and becomes a young man living like a wild man. He is eventually captured by the landowner’s men and accused of protecting the rebels.