Plot

A unique shelter for dogs in Europe, it is a place where animal controllers bring stray dogs. Showing the process of training these dogs, the film itself a metaphor, deals with the subjugation of the individual to the will of authority.

After the completion of The Same, a documentary that we made in 2016, in several prisons in Serbia, we organised an internal screening for the employees and convicts of the Penal Correctional Facility in Sremska Mitrovica. It was then that I learned from the warden about this project, launched not long before, which had the aim to resocialise convicts through dog training, and also that the Penal Correctional Facility in Sremska Mitrovica was the only one in Europe which housed a shelter for dogs. I felt it was a great story, but at that point I didn't want to make my next documentary in prison again. However, a few days later, while having a drink with my colleague Goran Radovanovic, I told him the story of the shelter and the dogs. The reaction on his face, while I was telling him my impressions from the shelter, was enough for me to decide to call the Administration for the Enforcement of Penal Sanctions the next day and ask for permission to shoot my new film. Dog training by convicts in a dog shelter inside the prison seemed to me to be a good metaphor for presenting a current social issue that leads us to ask ourselves: Who are the authorities whose will we conform and adjust to, and why do we uncritically accept the values they impose on us? We tend to conform because we are under the influence of different systems and authorities from earliest childhood, from parents, teachers, bosses and leaders to other agencies who adjust us through the exercise of reward and punishment, teaching us what behaviour is acceptable in order that we become good persons. We feel good when we are rewarded, and, as if automatically, we continue to do and say what others expect us to. We meet the expectations of others and become exactly as they are - and as we, according to their expectations, should be. We become automatons, living in the delusion that we are individuals who possess their own will and freedom. Adjusting is an observational documentary about submission to the will of others, the relativity of any authority, reward and punishment, rejection and acceptance, and about empathy and friendship between two beings - an animal and a human who both come from the margins and share a similar destiny.