The Anti-Communist Film Festival: the List

    As was recently reported in Breitbart, next year I’m planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival. It can be difficult and expensive to counteract all the left-wing propaganda coming out of Hollywood. As someone who regularly attends film festivals featuring movies from Ireland, Africa, Iran, and other countries, I realized that we could put on an Anti-Communist Film Festival, give the people the truth, and throw a big party. I am currently in talks with theaters in Washington, D.C., about rentals and licensing fees. They are enthusiastic about the project.    

    There is no shortage of great films over the last 70 years that have preached freedom. Here’s my list of the ten films we’d like to screen.

1. The Lives of Others
2. I Married a Communist
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
4. Red Dawn
5. My Son John
6. The Death of Stalin
7. I Was a Communist for the FBI
8. Hammer & Tickle
9. Freedom’s Fury
10. State of Control

    The Anti-Communist Film festival is a way for conservatives and sane liberals – if there are any left – can effectively push back against Hollywood. 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.” “Edward R. Murrow operated from a kind of moral clarity that feels vanishingly rare in today’s media landscape,” David Cromer said in a statement. “There was an immediacy in those early live television broadcasts that today can only be effectively captured on stage, in front of a live audience.”  At a New York press conference, Clooney added this: “It’s a subject matter that is very close to our hearts, which is what [the press] does. Telling the truth and holding truth to power. It’s a play we’re very excited to do.”

    Clooney’s idea that the media are truth-tellers focused on “speaking truth to power” is laughable. Both CNN and ABC have recently had to pay out to settle libel lawsuits. The liberal media haven’t come close to shaking off the scandal of the Russiagate hoax, and many of them seem to have been implicated in the fraud in USAID – while refusing to cover the story of the billions of dollars stolen. The press is interested in many things other than, as Clooney puts it in the trailer for his new play, “honesty, facts, integrity, accuracy, and truth.”

    Last year, the American Film Institute screened a series on films of the 1950s. Several of the movies are relevant in America in 2025. In 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent learns about a Marxist plan that is “a hellbrew of hate,” including urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other, then making profits off the court cases. One character in the film is a high school teacher. At one point, he declares, “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” Then there is 1952’s My Son John. starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin. It tells the story of a family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is a communist spy. John the communist bluntly tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son” – i.e., the state. I Married a Communist reveals the savagery with which communists treat those who try to defect. 

    A more recent film is the 2006 classic The Lives of Others, about the evil of the East German Stasi. 2026 will be the 20th anniversary of the great film.

    The Anti-Communist Film Festival can have a huge cultural impact, with speakers and scholars celibate great movies that champion freedom, but call out the lies of Hollywood. 

    In his great book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Allan H. Riskind reveals how many communists were in Hollywood in the post-war years. One of them, director Abraham, was “a thoroughgoing Communist.”  Polonsky once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”

    Polonsky wrote the 1948 film Force of Evil, which shows capitalism as a cruel and cutthroat system. In his intro to the DVD special edition Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese calls Polonsky’s blacklisting “a great loss” for American cinema. A commentary on communism and film noir is provided on the disc by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, who gets it right. Smith notes that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American free market system came into question. At the same time, and without defending the “sadistic” tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admits that many blacklisted writers “did attack capitalism and the American way.” Like today’s Hollywood, they were propagandists. “It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down,” Smith concludes.    

    Of course, modern conservatives don’t want to shut anybody down from making any movie they want. We just want equal time with George Clooney.

Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project. 

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