The Anti-Communist Film Festival has an official sponsor. It is the Victims of Communism Foundation.
This is a great development for an idea that I came up with and wrote about in the Washington Examiner last year. At the time, it was an idea. Now it’s official.
After some rejection from establishment Hollywood, I was contacted by the good folks at the Victims of Communism Foundation in Washington, D.C. They could offer a space, licensing for movies, and staff. We hope to make it an annual event and to attract young filmmakers. We are working hard and hope to host the event in fall 2026.
Like the punk rockers who defied the East German government during the Cold War, we are defying a liberalism that has gone hard left and, in many cases, is explicitly Marxist.
There have been many great anti-communist movies made over the last 100 years — from The Lives of Others to Trial to Night People — and to rediscover them is to rediscover the wisdom they hold about the evils of communism. Our centerpiece is The Lives of Others, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in mid-80s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). He is in a relationship with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), who, seeing the love and artistic freedom of Dreyman and Sieland, slowly starts to question state tyranny.
The Lives of Others stands as a metaphor for America in 2026. The Stasi, like the modern American Left, used shame as a weapon. Too many artists in both cases went along with totalitarian oppression. Whereas tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin repressed artists, the German Stasi worked with them, understanding their potential for spreading propaganda. In America in 2026, too many actors, writers, and comedians mindlessly go along with the Left. We don’t expect or demand that they agree with President Donald Trump. Just that they use critical thinking, especially about socialist leaders like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The modern Left has become experts at using shame against opposition. In an academic paper on The Lives of Others, 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.”
More than lectures or position papers, movies get into the soul and the psyche. Liberals have owned popular culture for over a century, especially in a place like Hollywood. I worked in a movie theater in college in the 1980s, and saw firsthand how film could inspire an audience and even change its worldview.
This is not to say that the Anti-Communist Film Festival will be a political rally. We want liberals to attend also. There once was a proud tradition of liberal anti-communism in America, with leaders such as John F. Kennedy. It would be nice to see that come back.
Kennedy and other Democrats once knew the history of Marxism. As journalist Piers Brendon recently wrote, “ever since the Russian Revolution, with a brief hiatus during the Gorbachev era, the Kremlin has practiced murder as a matter of state policy. … It organized mass killings during the Red Terror and set up a secret poison laboratory (using Gulag prisoners as guinea pigs) to eliminate individual ‘enemies of the people’.” As Leon Trotsky once said, “We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker–Papist babble about the sanctity of life.”
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For a century, most of Hollywood has been playing down this reality. The Anti-Communist Film Festival will celebrate those who told the truth.
