On her first trip to São Miguel, Cláudia Varejão visited several fishing villages, realising that “there was a huge LGBTQIA+ community”. It’s a community in the sense that there is a considerable number of queer individuals on the island, but, according the director, “They don’t communicate with each other; they don’t know each other. They are isolated in their own isolation. It was so astonishing to me that I just wrote a movie.” (The article continues below - Commercial information) sofia_meetings_internal Since then, Varejão has visited the island on a regular basis and is now living there (for the time being). One of the biggest factors that led her to pursue this project was her understanding of “how hard it was to live with your own difference in a context that is so closed in on itself”. It is a place with deep economic issues, “where the idea of leaving […] is just not likely”. The sense of urgency to create this film became ever clearer when the director started the casting process with locals last year. “People would come with such inhumane and violent stories that I just... I can’t even retell them.” All of the stories that she heard from the people she met during this time were an inevitable influence on the writing of the script for this fiction film, which was carried out in collaboration with Leda Cartum. As in her most recent work, the director will collaborate with non-professional actors (in this case, locals). The narrative will centre on a group of friends, composed of queer individuals who are on their last high-school summer vacation, right before leaving – or not – to go to university and to the continent. This is a well-known, crucial moment of transition, and constitutes one of the main topics of the film. “The phrase Wolf and Dog itself is an expression that tells us a lot about it: it’s something […] teetering between a pet and a wild animal. It’s also connected with twilight: the moment day turns into night and vice versa. All of this gradation that exists in between polarisation (in every possible way and form) is what this film attempts to portray.”
