A few months before his death, National Review’s founder William F. Buckley devoted an entire column to what he called “the best movie I ever saw.”
He was referring to The Lives of Others, a 2006 German film which won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film. It depicts life in Communist East Berlin in 1984 under the infamous Stasi secret police, who employed ten times as many agents and informers as the World War II Gestapo — even though East Germany had less than a quarter the population of Nazi Germany.
I won’t spoil the plot of The Lives of Others, other than to note that its story of how a loyal Stasi agent tasked with spying on a playwright and his lover begins to question his mission so captivated Buckley that he “felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.”
Mark Judge, a journalist in Washington, D.C., also recalls the profound impact the film had on him. To honor it on its 20th anniversary, he is including it in a week long anti-communist film festival this October in his home town.
“Conservatives have been complaining about Hollywood for decades, yet the right has struggled, through lack of will or lack of money, to make movies promoting freedom and revealing the evils of socialism,” he told me. His hope is that the festival will bring together scholars and creative types who can then collaborate on future work, have young people attend so they can better inoculate their peers from becoming socialists, and call out Hollywood for its shameful neglect of the totalitarian menace of communism.
Among people who will attend will be escapees from present-day socialist hellholes such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Belarus. Who knows, they may be joined by refugees from America’s new socialist outpost — the New York City of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who infamously opened his inaugural address in January with a promise to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Judge says his main goal is “to have fun and get a bunch of freedom-loving people under one roof for beer and popcorn. All for a small fraction of the cost of making a new film.” He hopes the idea will prompt other cities to hold their own festivals.
His D.C. festival already has two official partners: Washington’s excellent Victims of Communism Museum and The Moving Picture Institute.
But renting a deluxe theater and paying licensing fees doesn’t come cheap, so Judge has set up a GoFundMe page. As of now, he’s only $3800 short of his final fundraising goal of $26,000.
The list of films that will screen at Judge’s festival isn’t firmly nailed down, but he says you can count on almost all of the following to be on the bill.
The Lives of Others
I Married a Communist
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Red Dawn
My Son John
The Death of Stalin
I Was a Communist for the FBI
Dr. Zhivago
Hail, Caesar!
Hammer & Tickle
Freedom’s Fury
State of Control
It’s only right that after the many film festivals that the left has used to showcase victims of the Joe McCarthy-insprired blacklist of the 1950s (many of whom were actual communists), other perspectives be given a chance. For decades, Hollywood artists from Woody Allen (The Front) to Warren Beatty (Reds) and Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) have turned out films that whitewashed the evils of communism and minimized its destructive impact.
Let’s have fun and some equal time. I hope to see you there.