The Locarno Film Festival is to focus its 2026 retrospective on the infamous Hollywood blacklist and is programming films from one of the most politically charged periods of US cinema.
The Hollywood blacklist, an attempt to counter communist influence in US culture after the end of World War II, saw perceived communist supporters jailed or prevented from working in the film industry.
Many were called before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
’Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist’ aims to re-examine what it described as “a repressive yet defiantly creative era, which mirrors the political attacks on free speech and artistic freedom seen again today”.
The programme will highlight key films by directors, writers and stars such as John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charles Chaplin, and trace the Red Scare’s origins and aftermath across the US, in Europe, and beyond.
Spanning fiction, documentaries, newsreels, and shorts from the US, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, and Argentina, the programme will bring together digital restorations and archival prints for an examination of the films of the period.
Among the films to be presented are The Sound Of Fury (1950) by Cy Endfield; The North Star (1943) by Lewis Milestone based on a script by Lillian Hellman; Ruthless (Edgar Ulmer, 1948) written by Alvah Bessie and Gordon Kahn; Intruder In The Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), written by Ben Maddow; Crossfire (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Adrian Scott; and Amazing Mr X (1948), directed by Bernard Vorhaus.
It will also feature films rarely shown in the context of the blacklist, such as None But The Lonely Heart (1944) by Clifford Odets and España Otra Vez (Jaime Camino, 1969) written by Alvah Bessie.
The retrospective is produced in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
“If you insist on calling classic Hollywood a ‘dream factory,’ you have also to see how that notion was hammered into pieces by some of the most politically progressive figures in the history of American cinema across the more than forty films brought together in this retrospective,” said Khoshbakht. ”It is the timeliest one I have worked on in my life. The imaginative ways of incorporating political consciousness into film, and the tragic consequences of that political determination, form the thrilling story of this programme, offering new angles on the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.”
The 79th Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 5 to 15.
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