What is 'Pigs' about? 'About a dog's world, about the fact that freedom also engenders filth and stupidity while destroying ideals. Everything has been debased, sullied in mud, thrown into the cesspool,' wrote a reviewer. Such extreme critical reactions were elicited by the film's subject matter and its portrayal of the world as fundamentally castrated of positives and saturated with cynicism, moral dirt and cruelty. A world that is simultaneously hardly abstract, and in fact present in the here and now (i.e. in Poland in 1989), one that is additionally portrayed in an iconoclastic and provocative manner, derisive of all things sacred, be they related to nation or religion.