Un Baldwin Andalou (Heart of a Dog)
2023-2025

​The film shot in Senegal, Berlin and Brazil Bahia, follows the dialogues of street canines as they reflect on the fears of their former owners. A dog named Baldwin meets his friends; Laika a space dog, Basenji a dog without a bark and Sharik is a human trapped inside the dog's body. Baldwin retraces the history of canines inside Black lives travelling with Laika through historical film and archive photographs. He wonders about the beginning of fear. He witnesses fear by his owner, a young Black woman trapped in a toxic relationship with her predator with no exit pathways. Baldwin gets to experience for the first time what it is like to be in fear of a woman, how a woman becomes in fear of another woman. A woman you love but that you deeply fear. Baldwin finds out that the root to the woman's entrapment is based on unresolved trauma in her black historical genealogy and the tiny bits that history books didn't want us to remember; the transition to colonialism triggered a collective fear of dogs too. When Baldwin time-travels to understand his roots in canine history, Baldwin creates a safe space for the Black girl to breathe slowly to feel her emotions and rebuild her identity that slowly was denied to her. 

Laika, Sharik, Basenji and Baldwin ruminate in thoughts living as stray dogs connecting to the soils of human ancestry and re-writing histories to break the abusive cycles of their so beloved owner.