Next year will mark America’s 250th birthday. There are piles of anniversary books in the pipeline, and Ken Burns has already released a documentary.
In 2026, I’m also producing an Anti-Communist Film festival, which I announced in the Washington Examiner. In celebrating America at 250, it’s also necessary to remind ourselves of the greatest threats to freedom in our modern history. Fascism and communism are foremost among these. Fascism gets a lot of coverage in the media. There is no shortage of books and movies about Adolf Hitler.
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What is not studied as deeply is the evil of communism. At next year’s film festival, however, we hope to show Freedom’s Fury (2006), a documentary about the Olympic water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.
The match took place against the background of the Hungarian Revolution, an anti-communist uprising that was brutally crushed by the Soviet army. The Olympic polo match between the countries turned violent, with historians calling it the “blood in the water match.” Freedom’s Fury was written and directed by Colin Keith Gray and Megan Raney Aarons. It was executive-produced by Lucy Liu and Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino described the film as “the best untold story ever.” Mark Spitz narrates the film.
2026 marks the 70th anniversary of that terrible match. I was fascinated by the role that Tarantino and especially Liu played in producing Freedom’s Fury. Liu seems to be the prime motivator. I reached out to the actress and producer through her representatives, but as of this writing, I have not heard back.
Of course, the “blood in the water match” is an “untold” story because the political Left does not like to remind people of the brutality of the old Soviet Union. The Russians took over Hungary in 1945 after World War II. In 1956, the Hungarian people staged an uprising, and for a few days, their country was free. On Nov. 4, a Russian invasion force crushed the rebellion, killing or wounding tens of thousands of Hungarian citizens.
The semi-final game against the Soviets became a political battle fought in the water. Variety said this in its review of Freedom’s Fury: “What makes this … film so riveting is the combination of interviews with the protagonists — all of whom display tremendous grace and poise in describing the events — with footage of the revolution. The footage is full of stunningly young, impossible good-looking students who, at first, march peacefully through the streets, astonished by the massive numbers of people from all layers of society (the marchers numbered at least 100,000 people, possibly twice that number when the protest reached its peak) who spontaneously decided to join them. Within days, however, those same students are holding weapons or, often, lying dead in the street. The violent emotional swings of those revolutionary days are difficult to comprehend; the power of each moment, though, can be seen on the faces of those who participated, particularly that of the man who weeps when asked to recall how he felt during their few days of freedom. ‘We were all family,’ he says.”
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Another witness puts it this way: “We told the Soviets we didn’t want to live a lie. We wanted to live a human life.”
Freedom’s Fury director Colin Keith Gray has noted that the polo athletes from both Hungary and Russia were victims of a system they all hated: “Both teams were as much a victim of the circumstances, and really both countries were imprisoned by the same ideology — and these guys were able to finally reconnect as human beings and as fellow athletes. That was something that we really wanted to highlight, the sort of humanistic side to counter the sort of oppression of ideology that everyone had suffered under in the Eastern Bloc.”
