TRAIL OF THE BEAST

Belgrade, 1979: Budding journalist Jugoslav Bucilo begins to pursue leads in the case of the former student leader Aljoša Josić, who is considered a missing person. At the same time, the body of an intelligence agent is found in a rural border area. Intelligence officer Blagoje Josić becomes involved in the investigation. Not only is he the father of the murdered man's wife – the prime suspect also happens to be his son: none other than Aljoša Josić. In spite of the push-back that Bucilo repeatedly faces in the course of his research, he gradually discovers that almost all of the individuals connected to the case have skeletons in their closets. TRAIL OF THE BEAST is saturated with Western influences: Bucilo drives a VW Beetle and sports a Zappa-esque goatee, while the film's typology seems like it absconded from a 1970s-era US-American conspiracy thriller. Here too, power struggles, corruption and cover-ups form the dank sub-soil for a society flourishing on the surface. In his feature film debut, Nenad Pavlović deftly combines a "Yugo-stalgic" aesthetic with the pessimism and social critique of a neo-noir to create a unique vision of life in the waning Tito era.