Jesus Movies and an Anti-Communist Film Festival Update

    Next year, we are putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival. As we approach the end of 2025 I want to thank everyone who has donated or just cheered on my attempt to make this happen. It is culture more than anything else that promotes freedom and changes people’s hearts, and nothing gets deeper into the souls of people than film. The Hollywood left has controlled the medium for over 100 years. We aim to change that. 

    At this point, I have a theater for rental, licensing forms for the movies we want to show, and interest from individuals and foundations. If we raise the money to do this, it will happen. If we don’t, it will not. 

    It may seem a contradiction, but we want many of the films we want to screen, like The Lives of Others and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be subtle works of art rather than hammering sermons. Yes, we are going to screen – and love – Red Dawn, but we also want films with understatement, sensuality (not pornography), complex characters, and a tone of reflection. 

    Part of the problem with current conservative movies, especially Christian ones, is that they paint in such obvious strokes. This was the point of an essay published this year by critic Cap Stewart on the website ChristandPopCulture.com. Writing about the Christian film The Shift, Stewart observed: “[There] is a key factor affecting—and even sabotaging—many a Christian filmmaker’s work: they take a visual medium like film, which is designed to show rather than tell, and craft a story that tells rather than shows. It’s as if these filmmakers imagine themselves in an alternate reality, where stories really are nothing more than glorified sermon illustrations. In this parallel universe, narratives are morally worthless—unless and until they can explicitly spell out What We Have Learned.”

    Stewart goes on to emphasize that “visual stories (like the films and television shows of our day) speak a different language than sermons do, communicating primarily with pictures rather than words. The storyteller might explain the nature of the story afterwards (as Jesus did sometimes with his parables), or he may not publicly explain it at all (as Jesus often didn’t after his parables). In either case, the explanation is a separate event from the story itself.” In Christian films, “the viewers sit back and passively listen rather than actively wrestling with the concepts in a more personal way.” 

    The Chosen, about the original apostles, is a fine film. Yet, like David, the just-released cartoon about the Old Testament figure, we know the story already and how it ends. Other Christian films like Disciples in the Moonlight, The Forge, and God’s Not Dead: in God We Trust all have the same storyline. That is, believers take on the evil secular government or the devil himself. They’re often cartoonish and poorly written. There is not much subtlety. It’s like the way conservative filmmakers like the Daily Wire keep making the same movie over and over again – a damsel in distress on the prairie uses guns to defend her family from bad dudes.

    Compare these movies to a classic like Diary of a Country Priest, the 1951 masterpiece about a priest who gets dumped into a small rural town where the people are annoying. The priest himself is a frail, struggling, and flawed protagonist. The film has beautiful dialogue, but primarily tells its story with fantastic cinematography. It remains captivating 70 years after its release.

    Since its publication in 2022, I have been approached a couple of times by Hollywood people about the film rights to my book The Devil’s Triangle. It’s about the spiritual warfare caused by a SCOTUS nominee who may possibly overturn Roe v Wade. Yes, there is good vs evil, religious figures, and long theological discussions. Yet the characters, especially the main protagonist, are flawed people. During the ordeal, people don’t always have faith in God. They also have pasts that include sex, drugs, and rock and roll. 

    The first person who expressed interest in a film version is a well-known actor who has shared the screen with Johnny Depp. “If you were on the Left,” he said, “this would already be in production. But you’re in a no-man’s land between the realism of Martin Scorsese – a Catholic – which you want to embrace, and trying to sell it to the Bible Belt.” More recently, the former head of a studio asked to see a script, which my co-writers and I are providing. He was honest about it: “This is a fantastic story, but the conservatives and Christians will blanch at the language and some scenes, and it’s a conservative film that defends the Right, so the liberals, which is most of Hollywood, will not want to touch it.” 

    Next year will be the 20th anniversary of the great anti-communist film The Lives of Others. The film is explicit about the wickedness of the communist Stasi in Germany that spied on, censored, and suppressed its citizenry, yet within that large frame, the characters are complex human beings dealing with roiling, unpredictable emotions. That’s the power of the film. We don’t need more cinematic sermons or women on the prairie shooting up the bad guys. We need challenging movies about real people.

Editor’s note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination. 

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