The Beast Is Still Alive

This political documentary is about the search for an ideal communism and how it has never been found in practice. The film begins with the secret police file on the grandfather of a young Bulgarian woman. He sympathized with the Bulgarian Socialists in 1920s, but after seeing the damage the Communist Party caused during World War II, he joined the Goryani anti-communist resistance movement in the Bulgarian mountains. Using animated sequences, time-lapse photography and a fictional dialogue in voice-over between the young woman and her dead grandfather, shows how young generations keep rediscovering communist ideology against the backdrop of discredited politicians and former agents of the secret police. The young woman’s attitude towards the political alternative to capitalism grows increasingly complex as she makes a trip to Cuba, and attends a panel discussion with the Slovenian philosopher and communist Slavoj Zizek.