Why the Anti-Communist Film Festival Should Be Named After a Prague Skateboarding Park

This week we’re launching the First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival. The event will be held at

the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.

Registration and admission are free. We do have sponsorships for those who want to support the work

going forward. The largest sponsorship is the Festival Founding Patron which is $50,000. For that you

become the “Exclusive naming sponsor of the Film Festival.”

Should we be lucky enough to have someone make a donation, they can name the festival after

whatever they want. Obvious names are the John Paul II Film Festival, or the Ai WeiWei Film Festival

—or even The Unknown Hoya Film Festival.

If I was given the chance, I’d name it after Letna Park. Letna Park is a huge and beautiful gathering

place in Prague, Czechoslovakia. It once showcased the world’s largest monument to dictator Josef

Stalin. It’s now a skatepark. In 2021 the Check historian Erika Cizek described the scene:

Today, the platform at the centre of Letná Park holds a massive metronome sculpture, and the

tiled area surrounding the metronome is used by local youth as a skatepark. This is a place of

near constant movement, seemingly permanently occupied by young people skateboarding or

taking in the panoramic views of the city. Beyond this vibrant contemporary presence, however,

lies a deeply significant history: the platform where the metronome stands today was once home

to the world’s largest monument to Stalin. This monument held immense symbolic power, and

remnants of this monument remain today in the form of the massive plinth left behind, as well as

the enduring name of this location: U Stalina (at Stalin’s). The youthful energy of the Metronome

starkly contrasts with the tangible memory of a brutal regime of the past, and its symbolic

proliferator.

The Letna Park Anti-Communist Film Festival. I like it. It has some flow and poetry to it. It also fits with

one of the films I hope to screen at a future festival, King Skate. Released in 2018 and directed by

Šimon Šafránek, the documentary celebrates the way Czechoslovakian skateboarders defied their

communist rulers, who during the Cold War trued to suppress skateboarding as a “hooligan” activity

that promoted capitalism. The film focuses on the pioneers of Czechoslovak skateboarding including

Ivan Pelikán, Petr Forman and Luděk Váša. Through homemade materials, attitude and desire for freedom, 

these riders turned skateboarding into a defiant stance against totalitarianism.