The most recent film-novel by the Czech classic film-maker, Karel Vachek, is on the subject of alien civilizations, who do not just live in the cosmos but on planet Earth itself.

A dog's funeral becomes part of a chain of absurd events including tomato ketchup battle, a reconstruction of the battle of Austerlitz and motorbike show.

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the Czech capital’s art-nouveau National Theatre become the occasion for a reflection on rebels, dissidents, and others subversives who stand in battle, heroically and sometimes tragically, against majority opinion, established rules, or powerful institutions. "As the camera wanders over, around and through Prague’s lavish National Theatre, director J.A. Pitínský coaches singers through a rehearsal of Bedřich Smetana’s tragic opera Dalibor. Intercut with the tale of the 15th-century knight who, imprisoned, refused to name names, Vachek interviews, on the plush red seats of the empty theatre, a whole series of latter-day rebels.

Egon Bondy prophesies the hell of global capitalism, Jim Cert admits to cooperating with the StB, Jaroslav Foglar cannot find a beer opener, while Ivan Diviscomments on his own funeral.

Quite a few years have passed since November 1989. Czechoslovakia has been divided up and, in the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus’s right-wing government is in power. Karel Vachek follows on from his film New Hyperion, thus continuing his series of comprehensive film documentaries in which he maps out Czech society and its real and imagined elites in his own unique way.

From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s ini­mitable point of view.

Documentary portrait of the life of circus artists during their winter break.