Later this year, we will be holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The official sponsor is the Victims of Communism Foundation.
Our GoFundMe fundraiser is going strong.
We will have dates, films, and a website soon.
We also want this to be an annual event that attracts young filmmakers. I was born in 1964 and grew up during the Cold War, and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I assumed - along with everyone else - that it signaled the end of the communist delusion.
I was wrong. Universities are overflowing with socialist teachers, and the students frequently quote Marx. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a Marxist who, according to Politico, uses “a canvassing playbook honed by the Democratic Socialists of America, perfected by 140,000 loyal foot soldiers and now underwritten by taxpayers.” Mamdani is also the son of filmmaker Mira Nair. Nair is a talented filmmaker. Her first movie, Salaam Bombay! was directed when she was 30. Her follow-ups Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and Queen of Katwe were nominated for awards.
The anti-Communist Film Festival wants to hear from young, freedom-loving filmmakers. On the International Movie Database list of the “50 Best Conservative Movies,” the most recent film, Juno, came out in 2007 - almost 20 years ago. Other films on the list are indeed brilliant, but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, and The Lives of Others.
The right loves to mock Lena Dunham, but what she accomplished, not only with Girls but also with her film Tiny Furniture and the book Not That Kind of Girl, requires remarkable work, skill, and dedication - and imaginative shoots and locations. Over the last century, beginning with movies and jazz and James Joyce’s Ulysses, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and in 1940 directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.
The centerpiece of the festival is The Lives of Others, the 2006 film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Von Donnersmarck was 30 when he started working on the film, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The Lives of Others 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.” It tells the story of a playwright in East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe). When Wiesler witnesses the artistic freedom of Dreyman and Sieland, he slowly starts to question the regime he works for.
These are the kind of themes that resonate especially with young people, who have as their American birthright the ability to question authority and reject anyone who wants to censor their art. Daniel Day Lewis was 30 when he starred in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which Roger Ebert described this way: “The film tells the story of a young surgeon who attempts to float above the mundane world of personal responsibility and commitment to practice a sex life that has no traffic with the heart, to escape untouched from the world of sensual pleasure while retaining his privacy and his loneliness. By the end of the story, this freedom has become too great a load for him to bear.” In that film, Daniel Day-Lewis’s life is disrupted by the Soviet invasion of Prague.
The Anti-Communist Film Festival wants to hear from the next Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and see the next Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s fine for conservatives to complain about the culture. There’s a lot to complain about. Communism didn’t die in 1989. Better still to do something about it.
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