Locarno Festival Presents Retrospective on Hollywood Blacklist and Its Legacy

The 79th Locarno Film Festival will showcase a new retrospective, "Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist," curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, highlighting the era’s censored artists and its modern relevance.

At the 79th Locarno Film Festival, a newly assembled retrospective titled "Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist" will examine one of Hollywood’s darkest periods, focusing on artists forced into exile by anti-communist persecution. Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, the program investigates the motivations of figures such as screenwriter Alvah Bessie and directors Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, who abandoned successful careers to work abroad under pseudonyms.

The showcase features nearly thirty 35mm prints, including seldom-seen blacklist classics like "Mission to Moscow," "The Intimate Stranger," and the Spanish-language "España otra vez," the latter written by Bessie himself. Khoshbakht draws unsettling connections between the blacklist’s climate of fear and contemporary political intimidation, though he emphasizes that the selection was not driven by present-day politics.

The festival will present the films in its top venue, GranRex, and benefits from the support of UCLA Film & TV Archive, Cinémathèque suisse and the BFI, with a companion book of scholarly essays and a podcast series. Losey’s son Gavrik will introduce the restored screening of his father’s once-banned work.