<em>When I Get Out</em>

In the world of enormous social differences, for many, life inside prison walls is a luxury. For the majority of the world population, life is, in principle, unjust. The worst criminals remain unpunished, some with enormous power over others. In such a world, what is the sense of incarceration? What is the prison good for? This is the main question of the documentary When I Get Out by Slovenian director Metod Pevec.

Romanticising crime

Pevec made his first feature film, Carmen, in 1995, based on his own novel, a romance between a poet and a prostitute located in some of the most iconic places of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana’s low life, such as the bar on the railway station. Fascination with people on the margins of society remained the distinct feature of the director’s oeuvre, as well as his documentary films, such as Home (Dom, 2015), about migrant workers in the construction industry. When I Get Out is no different. In his interviews about this documentary, the director repeated Foucault’s idea that society creates criminals. Journalists noted that one reason for the film’s great success with its audience (the film won the Audience Award at the Festival of Slovene Cinema in 2025) is its ability to show how quickly any of us could become a criminal. Yet, in the first place, it is Pevec’s sincere sympathy for his protagonists, as well as his capacity to prepare the prisoners who appear in the film for the work on screen, that make this film a unique insight into today’s world, one that extends beyond the prison walls.

We can’t avoid this system, but to trick it is worth a try.

Performance and psychodrama

«You can’t get back to 2008, but you can get out…» recites one of the protagonists of When I Get Out as they rehearse their performance for the prison ceremony where inmates showcase their work. The film opens with Pevec, the director, and Vladimir Milošević, the psychiatrist, entering Dob, Slovenia’s main male prison. They did so every Thursday for a year and a half. Pevec assisted with the inmates’ creative therapy and filmed psychodrama sessions guided by Milošević: a therapy in which prisoners acted out past events or personal conflicts, exchanged roles, and dramatised their situations or unspoken feelings. Two questions guided the psychiatrist and the director: how a criminal identity develops, and what the chances of rehabilitation are. When I Get Out is thus not a conceptual investigation into power and guilt, such as, for example, Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire, 2012), the legendary prison docudrama in which Paolo and Vittorio Taviani follow inmates at the Rebibbia Prison in Rome as they rehearse and perform Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It is also not an outright condemnation of outdated prison systems, such as the collective documentary In the Penal Colony (Nella colonia penale, 2025) by Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia, and Alberto Diana, that examines Sardinia’s open-air penal colonies. However, Pevec’s deeply humanist approach, based on the romanticised view of a criminal thoroughly inscribed into Slovene identity, celebrating a salt smuggler as a national literary hero, eventually yielded disturbingly non-humanist insights.

To trick the surveillance

One of the great features of this documentary is that it allows its protagonists to present themselves on their own terms. Even if the prison system classifies them according to the crimes they were convicted of, not all are open about this. Some minutely describe their particular experiences, such as using the car trunk to transport the victims, or the mode they carried the gun in constant anticipation of danger. Others concentrate on the violence they had been victims of since their youth. Their common point of identification is children; for example, when one prisoner speaks of their father, the other expresses a desire to care for their children properly.

In his latest book, Who Are You? (Kdo si ti? 2026), Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek emphasises that subjectivity is a product of the network of symbolic interactions with others, and that a person’s identity is determined by what they are for others. In this view, the process of prison rehabilitation, the one we witness in When I Get Out, can be compared to the process of inmates’ subjectivation, their novel identity formation. Through the others – the film director, the psychiatrist, other inmates in the psychodrama group, their children, their families, etc. – the inmates acquire their (post-prison) subjectivity. It is thus very peculiar that their conversation breaks down completely. It happens as it reaches the notion of «normality». While some insist they know what is normal and eagerly attest that they plan to replace their previous life with this normality when they get out, others are suspicious of the very existence of normality. Not surprisingly, considering the normality of the heterosexual family is imposed by the majority of film protagonists on a non-binary person among them. What I do find surprising is that some protagonists refuse to discuss this, while others complain about the lack of honesty. Pevec described in one of the interviews that the demand for honesty and its absence caused major conflicts among the film’s protagonists during filming. Yet, isn’t the rejection of «normality» at the end of a prison sentence a particular form of honesty? Knowing that people will leave prison ready to resume what they were doing before should at least cause some uneasiness. However, the modes used by prisoners to avoid the discussion of normality – through travesty, with a forced smile, or simply by silence – all seem innovative ways to trick the system of surveillance. This system, according to Foucault, had its origin in prison, but by now it has multiplied not only through surveillance cameras and much-dreaded Meta’s smart glasses, but also through social media and platform datafication, processes through which capitalism is exploiting our free labour and the data extracted from us in ways we don’t even know. We can’t avoid this system, but to trick it is worth a try.