It started as a piece in May in the Washington Examiner. It’s now becoming a reality.
Next year, I hope to hold an Anti-Communist Film Festival. As I wrote in May, a film festival showing great anti-communist movies is a great way to celebrate freedom and inoculate people against the evils of Marxism. It could also be a great party.
Well, people responded — a lot of people, and with great enthusiasm. Speeches are one thing, position papers from think tanks are great, podcasts are entertaining, but nothing gets into the psyche of Americans like movies. Movies enter the stream of our subconscious, where they teach and entertain us. They have a tremendous impact on the culture. For the past century, Hollywood has largely been controlled by the Left. Earlier this year, Broadway premiered Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by and starring George Clooney. As Playbill explained, “a work of historical drama, Good Night, and Good Luck centers on a clash between famed journalist Edward R. Murrow and infamous U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, of anti-communist HUAC fame.”
In other words, more of the same that Hollywood has been dishing out for decades. McCarthy is bad. Communists are slandered and misunderstood.
Well, enough. Here’s my list of the 10 films we’d like to screen.
- The Lives of Others
- I Married a Communist
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Red Dawn
- My Son John
- The Death of Stalin
- I Was a Communist for the FBI
- Hammer and Tickle
- Freedom’s Fury
- State of Control
I have been surprised not only by the enthusiastic response, but by the fact that I have heard from people in Hollywood. One director who has worked with Kurt Russell and Halle Berry has expressed interest in premiering a film at the festival. I also heard from several actors. They are ready for something different coming from Hollywood.
I have also been in talks with theaters in the Washington area, with a target date of fall 2026. Two of them got on board immediately, with the managers expressing admiration for the “great idea” of the festival. One is a restored Art Deco gem that features comfortable theater seats in the back and a large floor up front with dining tables. It’s also not cheap, as you would imagine for taking over such a space for three days or more. The owner was delighted when I told him that I had worked in the same theater as a college student in the 1980s. I saw all the Reagan-era classics there: Top Gun, Back to School, Blood Simple.
It’s also important that the Anti-Communist Film Festival be welcoming to liberals. I am friends with a talented young filmmaker who lives in Pasadena, California, and in a consultation with him, he noted that there were once anti-communist liberals in America — people such as President Harry Truman, Sen. Scoop Jackson, and President John F. Kennedy.
WILL THE MEDIA’S LIBEL PROTECTION LAST IN THE AGE OF TRUMP?
The timing is great for this. Next year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is also the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others (2006), arguably the greatest anti-communist movie ever made. The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in mid-’80s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman. He is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who, in seeing the love, artistic freedom, and humanity of Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland, slowly starts to question state tyranny.
One of the themes that is central to communism, and which has been adopted by the Western left, is shame. As journalist Laura Williams has described it, “If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies.”