Kora

“This photograph is as valuable as money,” says one of the contributors to this moving documentary about the psychological impact of becoming a refugee.

It’s just one of the photographic mementoes we see during the course of Wolf And Dog director Cláudia Varejão’s short film. One is on a mug, another kept in the back of a mobile phone case, all offering a vital connection to a past that the women here have been forced for various reasons to leave behind. Each photo comes with a lifetime attached to it as the contributors - Inna Klochko, Lana Alkouse, Margarita Sharapova, Norina Sohail and Zohra Ghadr Alzaman - from global trouble spots, including Afghanistan, Ukraine and Russia, offer first-person testimony about their lives and an insight into their emotions after becoming refugees in Portugal.

Varejão’s film itself is a collection of poignant snapshots, as she draws close to the women as they tell their stories, focusing on an eye, hands, the uniqueness of a fingerprint. Each story is individual and yet there are points of connection. The fear that forced the move in the first place, the patriarchal oppression that often fuelled it and the sense of dislocation afterwards. “It’s like a movie where you are suddenly in an unfamiliar place. You don’t know how you got there or why you’re there,” says one woman, while another talks of the sheer “shock” of it.

Allowing each woman’s testimony to play out uninterrupted means they gather weight, not just as individual stories but as a meditation on the nature of memory and our desire to preserve it. It's an impulse, one woman notes, stretches back into the mythology that gives the film its title. There’s also a sense of the bigger picture, a kaleidoscope of people who have similar experiences to those captured here but who lie just beyond the frame. Largely shot in black and white, which strips the film of unnecessary distraction, there are moments when it opens out into colour as new memories are created.

There’s hopefulness in the women’s philosophy, but from the film’s ominous piano opening, mixed with the sounds of violence, to its closing moments of a news report over the credits, Varejão reminds us of the far from rosy snapshot of the modern world, where the situations that have led the women to this are sadly far from being a distant memory.