An Anti-Communist Film Festival William F. Buckley Would Heartily Embrace |
A few months before his death, National Review’s founder William F. Buckley devoted an entire column to what he called “the best movie I ever saw.”
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He was referring to The Lives of Others, a 2006 German film which won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film. It depicts life in Communist East Berlin in 1984 under the infamous Stasi secret police, who employed ten times as many agents and informers as the World War II Gestapo — even though East Germany had less than a quarter the population of Nazi Germany.
I won’t spoil the plot of The Lives of Others, other than to note that its story of how a loyal Stasi agent tasked with spying on a playwright and his lover begins to question his mission so captivated Buckley that he “felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to........