Wolf and Dog / Lobo e Cão
Gothenburg
Fri 29 Sep
18:30 — Hagabion
Malmö
Sat 7 Oct
15:30 — Panora Sal3
Stockholm
Sat 7 Oct
18:00 — Zita Room 2
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 2022
GENRE: Fiction
DIRECTOR: Cláudia Varejão
COUNTRY: Portugal
FILM DURATION: 111 min
AGE LIMIT: 12
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Ana was born in São Miguel, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean ruled by religion and traditions. Growing up as the middle child of a family of three with her mother and grandmother, Ana realized that girls and boys were given different tasks at home. Through her friendship with Luis, her queer best friend who loves dresses as much as pants, Ana questions the world that is promised to her. When her friend Cloé arrives from Canada, bringing with her the glowing days of youth, Ana embarks on a journey that will take her beyond the horizon. Filled with new desires, the light of Wolf & Dog will reveal to Ana the right sea for her to sail.
Wolf & Dog is the enchanting ode to the island’s queer community. The twlight glow that crosses the immense Atlantic Ocean.
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: English
Review
At a certain point one of the oldest characters vents something along the lines of: “do you also want to leave? Like everyone else? It’s like there’s no life here”. She is talking about the fate of the place where she lives to a friend of Ana, her daughter, but she’s in fact thinking about Ana’s fortune and future.
This is the story of an island, but also of a lonely character who is herself an island, trying to break her isolation from the rest of the world around her.
Ana lives in São Miguel, one of the islands of Azores, located in the Atlantic Ocean with nothing else in sight. While everything seems to be slightly stuck in time and religion and tradition are still largely influential on the shape of daily life, Ana, rather than wanting to leave, seems to be looking for her own place in the world.
These are the stories of those who stay when everyone wants to leave, and Claudia Varejão focuses her film on Ana and her group of friends, who run opposite of what is expected of them. Lobo e Cão (Wolf and Dog, 2022) is Varejão’s first foray into fictional film, but she maintains all the traces of her previous documentary work, creating an enticing and sensitive film by using the island’s natural elements (its landscapes but also its sounds, of the whales or ships, always in the background), to a haunting effect.
A shy and introverted character, it isn’t always clear what Ana is thinking
and the film cleverly uses her indefiniteness and ambiguity to show us how traditions and its folklore can shape or be shaped to be part of one’s identity.
Along with Ana’s journey, Varejão discovers an interesting parallel with the film’s characters, who are trying to break free of the molds they are expected to fulfill and the island, too small to contain them but nevertheless a part of them, a place of passage despite also remarkable.
João Araújo
À pala de Walsh