Later this year we will be holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The idea for the festival was mine, and there is now an official sponsor, the Victims of Communism Foundation. A second sponsor has also expressed interest and we will announce them soon.
Our GoFundMe fundraiser is at 99%.
We hope that the festival becomes an annual event. We would also like to attract new young filmmakers. I’m not just talking about a Gen Z director who has videotape of classmates in college idiotically quoting Marx, although that is always useful. We want people who understand and are in love with the aesthetics of film and how it gets into people’s souls. Great anti-communist films from The Lives of Others to Trial with Glenn Ford to The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Daniel Day Lewis are not only great films about freedom, but they are also great films.
They are also films about young people. I was born in 1964 and grew up during the Cold War, yet the threat of socialism may be greater for young people in 2026 than in 1986. Marxist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is 34. He’s also the son of filmmaker Mira Nair. Nair is a talented filmmaker. Her first movie, Salaam Bombay! was directed when she was 30. Her follow-ups, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and Queen of Katwe were nominated for awards.
The centerpiece of the festival is The Lives of Others, the 2006 film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was in his early 30s when he made the film, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The Lives of Others is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose 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 1984.”
The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe). When Wiesler witnesses the artistic freedom of Dreyman and Sieland, he slowly starts to question the regime he works for.
These are the kind of themes that resonate with young people, who have as their American birthright the ability to question authority and reject anyone who wants to censor their art. Roger Ebert described The Unbearable Lightness of Being this way: “The film tells the story of a young surgeon who attempts to float above the mundane world of personal responsibility and commitment to practice a sex life that has no traffic with the heart, to escape untouched from the world of sensual pleasure while retaining his privacy and his loneliness. By the end of the story, this freedom has become too great a load for him to bear.” In that film, Daniel Day-Lewis is woken up by the Soviet invasion of Prague.
In 2023, a thirtysomething filmmaker named Paul Roland released a film he wrote, produced, directed, and stars in. It’s called Exemplum. Shot in black and white, the film tells the story of a priest whose obsession with social media fame leads him into a spiritual spiral. It’s Breaking Bad set in a California parish.
Exemplum was made for $10,000. “There’s plenty of promise here that will warrant keeping an eye on Roland,” reviewer Douglas Davidson wrote, “mostly because there’s a daring here to ask big questions within an institution that’s overgrown past its intended purpose. Institutions far too often seek to preserve themselves rather than the ideas that spawned them, and they tend to attract like-minded individuals, thereby perpetuating problems instead of remaining malleable and within purpose. Exemplum isn’t afraid to point out the frailty of community constitution and what it looks like when that’s taken advantage of. This makes Exemplum worth ruminating on; this makes what the next big question Roland seeks to explore interesting.” Critic Christian Toto wrote this: “Exemplum offers something meatier for secular and faith-based audiences alike. Its protagonist’s flaws are obvious, but his journey is both fresh and inviting. You haven’t seen a story like this before, and that’s refreshing.”
I became friends with Paul Roland when Exemplum was released, and I gave it a positive review. Roland, 32, lives in Pasadena. He’s married with a young daughter and is working on a new project, a fictional podcast called Punch the Line. He describes it as “a multi-episode fictional podcast that is a coming-of-age teenage dramedy in the spirit of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe.”
Paul and I often discuss so-called “conservative” film and how bad so much of it is. Christian studios keep making Jesus movies, and the Daily Wire can’t move past the damsel-in-distress-on-the-
Roland and I are Catholic and love films with Catholic themes—even if the characters are flawed. “Without mystery and doubt,” Roland once told me, “we would have no faith. Exploring faith or moral concepts derived from faith means exploring the distance between God and Man. As St. Augustine rightly noted, civilization will always be a mind of its own, going toward God or away from God at any given moment in time, while being gently guided by God’s grace. True Christian storytelling (even of a secular brand) wanders the valley between saints and sinners, between righteousness and depravity, between certainty and absurdity. Christian storytelling respects the complexity of humanity, understanding that goodness sometimes comes in confusing packages while evil sometimes appears pristine and pure. To be a Christian storyteller is to be in love with the human soul, exploring its propensity for greatness and great evil.”
We will be announcing our newest sponsor soon. If you’re a young filmmaker, we want to hear from you.
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