The Anti-Communist Film Festival 

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This leftist shibboleth, credited to author and activist Audre Lorde, is, of course, nonsense. It’s quite possible to use valuable tools created by an oppressor to take down that oppressor. In fact, I plan to engage in a bit of this later this year, in October. That’s when the Anti-Communist Film Festival, a plan I am cooking up with the help of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, will premiere at a theater in Washington, D.C. Showcasing some of Hollywood’s best pro-freedom movies, the goal is to help the movie industry—and hopefully a lot of young Americans—rediscover the value of liberty and the iniquity of socialism.  
 
The idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival came to me in August, although the concept has been percolating in my subconscious for years. I regularly attend film festivals, most often at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. One of my favorite annual events is the DC Noir Festival, featuring film noir movies that were popular in the postwar era. Gritty, well-written, and featuring gorgeous cinematography influenced by German Impressionism and crime novels, they often include mysterious femme fatales and are drenched in shadows and intrigue—classics like Out of the Past (1947), Double Indemnity (1944), and He Walked by Night (1948) come to mind. 
 
This year, while watching these films I realized something: many of the great postwar era films are also anti-communist films, and some of them are very good. Many are also still strikingly relevant.  

The Anti-Communist Film Festival does not want to shut down filmmakers or tell them what kind of movies to make. We just want to offer the audience the truth about an evil pseudo-religious cult, which has caused more damage to the world than anything that could be depicted in a disaster movie. The first film on the festival list is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 German film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others. Written and directed by first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and winner of best foreign film Oscar. It is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote “an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose tentacular network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll – a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in mid-80s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). He is involved with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) who, while seeing the love, artistic freedom and humanity of Dreyman and Sieland, slowly starts to question state tyranny. 
 
If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies. 

In an academic paper on the great film The Lives of Others, 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. For the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was other people, the gaze of others in a room that was never dark, a place of no exit in which no one could close their eyes. On a broad historical scale, it was not long ago that the punishment of public shaming was abolished in Europe; readers  of  English  literature  may  recall,  for  example,  the  laughing stock in Shakespeare’s King Lear. While this practice no longer exists in modern society, the expression ‘to be a laughing stock’ persists as do, obviously, situations which provoke shame. But it is not just the exposure of guilt that elicits feelings of shame, nor even the violation of one’s integrity, or being personal and vulnerable without receiving a reciprocal confidence. It is an anxious concern with the self, the feeling that  the  other  has  taken possession of  us  and  that  we  have  lost  something  of ourselves past control and recovery.

Shame was a tool of the Stasi and is a tool of the modern left. It is brilliantly explored in The Lives of Others. 

As a lifelong movie fan who goes to a lot of film festivals, it hit me: We don’t necessarily have to spend tens of millions of dollars on making movies. Some of the best pro-freedom films have already been made. Films like Night People, My Son John, Hail, Caesar!, The Lives of Others. Why not have an Anti-Communist Film Festival? It could be a powerful annual celebration with receptions and speakers. It’s a fun and cost-effective way to get the truth out there. 

Mark Judge is a journalist and filmmaker whose writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Caller. The views and opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Follow this space for more information about VOC’s Anti-Communist Film Festival.