The Anti-Communist Film Festival: Update and Why I Love Actual Film

    Very soon, the Victims of Communism Foundation and Museum will be announcing the lineup for the 2026 Anti-Communist Film Festival. It will be held October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum.

    I started the effort to do the festival over a year ago, and wanted to give a quick update before we announce the full schedule. We are in the process of securing licensing for a couple of remaining films we want to screen. Most have already been secured. As soon as the last couple of movies are secured, it’s showtime. We have the rights for most of the films we are showing, including our centerpiece film, The Lives of Others.

    I’d like to thank everyone who has been supporting this effort for their patience and enthusiasm. We see this as an annual event that can grow and become as big as the other film festivals.

    I also hope that we will be able to screen some films on, well, actual film. “Film is softer and more human,” director John Boorman once said, “while electronically made films are harsher and feel more mechanical. The latest iPhones offer not only a ‘video’ option on the camera, but also a ‘cinematic’ one, which Apple claims more resembles old-fashioned film.”

    Film has a way of getting into your consciousness and subconsciousness in a way that digital movies just can’t begin to mimic. It really is “softer and more human.” I learned this in the 1980s when I worked in a movie theater in Maryland. It had originally been the Bethesda Theatre, designed in 1938 by the firm of John Eberson, the “Dean of American Theatre Architecture.” The theater was designed in the historic Streamline Moderne style and still has some of the art deco illustrations — spinning stars, planets, suns — on its deep blue walls.

    After a fallow period in the 1970s, the Bethesda reopened in 1983 as the “Bethesda Cinema ’n’ Drafthouse.” We featured “second-run” movies, i.e., films that were no longer in wide release but had yet to come out on VHS video. The interior had been reconfigured, the old rows of seats removed and replaced with round tables and low, comfortable swiveling chairs. The Drafthouse served beer, wine, and pub food (pizza, nachos, sandwiches). I saw hundreds of films over and over again.  The best films from that time are part of my subconsciousness and my soul: Blood Simple, Top Gun, Blue Velvet, Broadcast News, Aliens, Little Shop of Horrors, To Live and Die in L.A., Big Trouble in Little China, and Beverly Hills Cop, among others. 

    I still live with these films because they were, well, on film. The projection room upstairs at the Drafthouse was massive, the size of a four-car garage with a high ceiling. When things were slow downstairs, we would sometimes head up to the roof to have a smoke or sneak a beer. I would walk around the wagon-wheel-sized platters where the film was clicking and whirring; it was like a living thing. Manager Roger was the maestro who made sure the film made it from the distributor to the theater and that once in our hands it ran smoothly. Sometimes it didn’t. During the showing of American Anthem, a cheesy 1986 vehicle for Olympic gymnast Mitch Gaylord, the film actually broke. One second Mitch was pulling off a dismount, then there was a snap, and the screen flickered and went blank. The audience actually applauded, happy to get their money back.

    Another time we opened up the canister holding Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) only to discover that a pirate had literally cut out one of the movie’s best scenes, where Pee Wee dances to “Tequila” in a biker bar. Before the screening, another manager, Steve, took to the stage down front and explained to the audience that the scene was missing. Instead, the staff of the Drafthouse would perform the scene for them, right now. We got up there and made fools of ourselves as “Tequila” blasted over the PA. People were cheering us on.

    This is the kind of warmth that came with film and that Boorman is right to lament is missing from today’s movies. Somehow film is able to get deeper into your soul, even making the world look different when the lights go up. Quentin Tarantino, a producer of the great anti-Communist film Freedom’s Fury, knows what I’m talking about.

          It’s almost showtime, folks. Thanks for your patience.

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