As regular Hot Air readers know, we’re holding an Anti-Communist Film Film Festival this October at the Victims of Communism Foundation, which is also our sponsor. You can donate here.
Movies change lives. Film gets into the soul and the subconscious, altering perceptions of the world and creating understanding. It’s why Roger Ebert called movies “an empathy machine.” the Left has owned Hollywood for a century. It’s time to change that. We also intend for the festival to be an annual event. As Al Pacino once put it, I’m just getting warmed up!
I had the idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival over a year ago, and the response has been great enthusiasm and some solid media hits. Before taking a short break for the August recess and then letting the Victims of Communism Foundation host news about the festival, including the schedule, I wanted to briefly lay out what I envision as the future of the festival.
I see the Anti-Communist Film Festival as an annual event, a success from the first year but also expanding in size and stature into the future. I’d like it to become a place where young and upcoming filmmakers can creatively express their love of freedom and expose the lies told by Marxists. I want dramas and comedies and cartoons and shorts. I want this to expand into a national or even international event, with digital simulcasts going to anywhere people want to participate.
I also, at the risk of sounding immodest, believe that my position as the director of the festival should be a fully funded position, no different than a fellow at a conservative think tank or a top editor at a conservative media company. This effort has taken work. We have wanted to change the culture for decades and need to support the people doing just that. The left certainly does. We on the right have been waiting for something like this for years. Conservatives can get infected with the culture of complaint that is prevalent on the left. Sometimes we are grousing so loudly we don’t see something wonderful before our eyes. As a character in Breaking Bad once put it, learn how to say yes. Don't complain about Hollywood being leftist then not support the person - or people - who can actually change that.
I want people to have fun at the festival, which is why we are screening comedies. As Allan Ryskind notes in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters: Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, the left hated anti-communist director Elia Kazan not just because he came out against communism in the 1950s, but because he did it with such enthusiasm. “Kazan was not only the most illustrious former Communist from the entertainment industry to have cooperated with HUAC,” Ryskind writes. “What really galled the Hollywood Left was that Kazan appeared to have become a believing anti-Communist who thought cooperating with the Committee, even if one had to name names, was absolutely justified. That is what the Left has never been able to forgive.” Two days after his HUAC appearance, Kazan took out an ad in the New York Times urging others who knew about Communism to defect. The Kazan ad said that he had placed the facts he knew about this “dangerous “dangerous and alien conspiracy” before the “House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve”—without reserve—and “that any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate government agency.” The American Communist Party, his ad continued, “was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin,” attempting “to dictate personal conduct,” and “habitually distort[ing] and violat[ing] the truth.” To be a Party member, he stressed, “is to have a taste of the police state.” Firsthand experience with the Communist Party not only “left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods,” but with the conviction that we must fight to preserve “the very things which [Communists] kill” in the countries they already rule. Kazan noted that the communists suppress “free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights.”
Not surprisingly, Kazan was blackballed by the American Film Institute - which also, after some flirting, shot down hosting the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, one of the greatest anti-communist films ever made. That film will be our centerpiece. As I argue in my book The Devil’s Triangle, the most perfect analogy to the modern left is not the Nazis, but the Stasi.
One of the theaters we are considering renting for the festival is the Bethesda Theater. I worked at the Bethesda Cinema when I was in college in the 1980s and it was known as the Bethesda Cinema ’n’ Drafthouse. The Drafthouse had originally been the Bethesda Theatre. In 1983 the Bethesda re-opened as the Bethesda Cinema and Drafthouse. We featured “second-run” movies, films that were no longer in wide release but had yet to come out on VHS video. VHS tapes played a role in the collapse of communism, as Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies were kidnapped into the Eastern Bloc.
I was a bartender at the Drafthouse when we screened Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first film. Years later at the festival I hope to screen the Coens' anti-communist comedy Hail, Caesar!
Now with a Marxist mayor of New York and socialism popular at universities, the same totalitarian monster has reared its head again, like the plant Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors that thrives on blood. More than lectures offered at think tanks, more than white papers or dry symposiums, more than podcasters and influencers, films can reveal to the young that communism is an evil system that always results in misery.
We are about to launch something that can become a major annual cultural event. A Sundance for right-wingers. We are about to change the culture. As Kurt Russell says in Big Trouble in Little China, “May the eagle of liberty never lose feather.”
You can donate here.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member