Sailors Dogs was filmed in the ruins of the small town of Velho Airão, in the Brazilian Amazon. Founded by Portuguese missionaries in 1694, Airão was the point where all the rubber production in the region was concentrated. After a fast and unsustainable economic growth, the city went bankrupt and was abandoned. Sailors Dogs juxtaposes the homonymous tale by Portuguese poet Herberto Helder with the dismantled landscapes of the village. In a perspectivist inversion, textual and visual images assemble and disassemble within a forest eaten away by men. By reflecting on the precarity and fragilities of human nature, and the limits of our relationship with the environment, the film questions our place of dominance in the universe that we inhabit.

Janaina Wagner (1989, Brazil. Lives and works between Paris and São Paulo) works with cinema, photography, scenography, drawing, video and installations, researching the relations of limit, control and contention that human-kind establishes with the world. Currently in residency at Gasworks and doing a PhD with Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Wagner participated in several artistic residencies, such as FID Campus – Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, Bolsa Pampulha, Festival Mondes Possibles – Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Casa Tomada, Anarcademia W139 Amsterdam and NES Skagaströnd. Among the main exhibitions, stand out A natural History of Ruins – Pivô (Brazil), Casa Carioca – MAR Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Ensaio de Tração – Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), Simultan Festival XV – Unseen (Romania), 10 ª Semana de Cinema do Rio de Janeiro.

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