Creating a Documentary - Speranta (Hope) The Street Dogs of Romania

Written by John Storton, MD.

Yellow Spider Media creates corporate video content regularly (well, before lockdown at least) so when I was asked about creating a film for animal charity, The Pack Project I assumed it would be a promotional video, perhaps an explainer video of how to donate. Over the months that followed though, the pre production process uncovered an amazing story. And one that justified a lot more time and effort than anything done previously. That isn’t to discredit any corporate video work we’ve been part of. I’m still very proud of our video production and the effort we put in. But travelling across Europe to spend a few days witnessing quite horrific events, and the decision to make this a passion-project-style documentary, rather than a corporate video makes this content something extra special for me and something I’m proud to be a part of.

Romanian Street Dogs Documentary

I love dogs. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs! So I jumped at the chance of filming for charity that re-homes stray dogs. The charity is based in the UK. So am I. The thought was to film loads of dogs with celebrity ambassador, Rosie Marcel (Jac Naylor, Holby City), lots of tails wagging… happy days! But The Pack Project doesn’t re-home UK stray dogs, but dogs abandoned on the streets of Romania. It’s estimated that there are over 600,000 stray dogs on the streets there. And without a neutering programme in place the numbers are getting out of control. This is where the charities and rescue centres come in, to try to get the dogs adopted to the UK other countries across Europe. But when we arrived in Brasov, Romania we quickly discovered that there was a lot more to this story…

Inhumane Treatment of Dogs

We weren’t allowed to film what’s really going on. (Although a future follow up documentary might)

These dogs are being captured by Government-affiliated dog catchers and.. well… killed. The official story is that the conditions for the dogs are great and that these pounds have the best medical facilities and are well looked after but the truth is quite different. There’s money involved, you see. So the pounds are paid (supposedly 150 euros per animal) to capture, feed and eventually euthanise the dogs. But it seems that some of these places have figured out that they can profit more if they don’t spend any on food. And there’s even more profit if the drugs that are supposed to be used for euthanasia are sold on the black market. But the dogs still need to be killed, right? So one can only imagine what the brutish looking fella who claimed to be a security guard was employed for. All speculation of course. i don’t want the Romanian Govt. on my back!

Like I said, we weren’t allowed to show any of this. Instead we focused on the positives. Some dogs are rescued and live in rescue centres until they are adopted to other European countries. There are happy endings. I hope that this film will encourage more people to adopt a dog from Romania, and save more lives.

You can see the mini-documentary, Speranţă (Hope) The Street Dogs of Romania here