‘A Huge Success!’ Year One of the Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

The First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival was a huge success. It’s an idea I came up with over a year ago, and the idea became a reality when the Victims of Communism Museum became the official sponsor. It was held October 1-4. We screened Pilecki’s Report, The Killing Fields, Night Crossing, Red Dawn, The Lives of Others, and Hail, Caesar! 

We’re already working on next year’s festival, but before moving ahead let me make couple observations. The first is, people on the right need to get better at supporting artists, creatives, and the storytelling that comes with them. I launched the idea for the festival over a year ago with nothing. I traveled to theaters around the mid-Atlantic talking to owners, I cold-called Hollywood about licensing, I wrote over 100 articles and blog posts to bring attention to the idea. The left supports these kinds of efforts to advance their ideas and capture the imaginations of the public, which is why they win so often. We can do the same.

In 1975, a band called The Sex Pistols appeared with a new spirit and energy and forever changed rock ‘n roll. I believe these kinds of projects can inject a similar energy into the conservative movement. Keep the flame alive.

Now for the experience of the film festival itself. Let me first say that the staff and interns at the Victims of Communism Foundation did a fantastic job pulling everything together. They put everything into this, including purchasing a small popcorn popper (a very nice touch that was hugely popular with the audience). They worked out any glitches with the films and were polite and welcoming to the guests.

And the guests—God bless them! They were super enthusiastic about what we were doing. I lost count of the times someone came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you for doing this.” They deeply understood the point I’ve been making for years: Conservatives are pretty good at organizing top-down enterprises—think tanks, white papers, even movie studios (even when these studios produce bad movies—another thing several guests at the festival mentioned). But what we are not as good at is organizing from the bottom-up. Supporting a pro-freedom punk band. Paying iconoclastic journalists a living wage. Spotting and supporting young actors, directors, artists. Putting on film festivals.

For this festival, I decided to use Hollywood’s weapons against it. As I said in my talk, the idea for the festival hit me when after years of going to ordinary film festivals I realized that many of the best films I saw were actually anti-communist films. It’s cool for hipsters to mock movies like I Was a Communust for the FBI, I Married a Communist, or My Son John. Yet many of these films, in fact, are quite good.

In I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent infiltrates the Communist Party in Pittsburgh. He learns that their plan is “a hellbrew of hate”—urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the left can be called in to establish order and make huge profits working the court cases. (It’s hard to argue, given the last decade, that any of this is far-fetched). Another character in the film is a high school teacher. “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” the film notes. That also rings familiar.

The cinematographer for I Married a Communist, Nicholas Musuraca, is the same cinematographer for the noir classic Out of the Past. (Read more.)

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