The Locarno Film Festival will host a film retrospective centered on the Cold War-era Hollywood Blacklist during this year’s edition, which runs August 5 to 15.
Titled Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, the retrospective has been curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The programme will span fiction films, documentaries, newsreels, and shorts from the U.S., Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, and Argentina. Major industry figures from the era included in the retrospective include John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charles Chaplin.
Like past retrospectives hosted by Locarno, this programme will be accompanied by a comprehensive book featuring contributions from international film scholars and critics. A podcast, written by Khoshbakht, will also be published.
One of the darkest chapters in American moviemaking history, the Hollywood Blacklist was a period of political persecution starting in 1947, where studios banned individuals suspected of Communist ties.
“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,” Khoshbakht said in a statement.
“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 5 to 15 August 2026.
