Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m happy to announce the lineup for the 2026 Anti-Communist Film Festival. We have some wonderful films we are screening: The Lives of Others, Night Crossing, Hail, Caesar!, Pikleck’s Report, The Killing Fields, Red Dawn.
The full lineup and registration form can be found here.
It’s been quite a journey getting here.
For over a year I have been visiting theaters and talking to people at the movie studios about licensing, as well as conversing with young directors about their future projects. The Victims of Communism Foundation came on board as a sponsor. Now we’re ready to roll.
First, some housekeeping. I will be shutting down the festival’s GoFundMe shortly as we migrate all of the festival business over the Victims of Communism website. The GoFundMe allowed to do this work for over a year, and I can’t express how grateful I am to those who donated. I’m hoping that the job of Director of the Anti-Communist Film Festival will eventually become a salaried position. We have a very potent weapon in the culture war. We should support it.
The centerpiece of the festival is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, which was written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll – a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell’s 1984.”
The Lives of Others dramatizes the role of shame in leftist politics, and is as relevant today as it was in 2026. In an academic paper on the film, historian Hans Lofgren explores the deep power of shame to alter our lives. “Stare long enough into the eyes of a dog who does not know you, and he will begin to bark. Many animals, human beings among them, experience the stare as threatening aggression. But, unlike other animals, human beings can feel shame at being exposed to an unwavering look, a look which threatens the private self that is only shared in deeply trusting relationships.”
On October 25, 1991, the German singer and poet Wolf Biermann was awarded the Buchner Prize, Germany’s highest honor for literature. During his acceptance speech, Biermann, once branded an enemy of the state, lamented how many writers had informed for Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Biermann noted that there had been very few “bright stars” and “upright citizens” under the communists. Instead, Germany had seen too many “self-pitying, well-nourished subjects,” while even opposition groups had been “eaten away by the Stasi metastases.”
Woke, our own “Stasi metastases,” is currently eating away at the soul of America. We also have a problem of rising Marxism. The Anti-Communist Film Festival aims to reclaim our souls and our freedom, one movie at a time. It’s going to be an awesome party.
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