‘The Blacklist was a Plague’ — Locarno Retrospective Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht Talks About What We Can Learn from the Intolerance of the Past
A new retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival, "Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist," examines one of Hollywood's darkest chapters, when directors, writers and actors were driven from the industry during the anti-communist "Red Scare". Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht told Variety the programme grew from his fascination with why successful filmmakers such as Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield gave up comfortable careers, left their families and worked abroad under false names rather than co-operate with investigators demanding they name colleagues.
The programme features work by figures including Dalton Trumbo, John Garfield, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright and Charles Chaplin, and Khoshbakht said the blacklist "was a plague" that caused serious health problems, broke up families and drove people to suicide, while also preventing potentially great films from being made. He cited "Salt of the Earth", whose Mexican lead actress was deported by immigration officers mid-production, and drew a pointed parallel with the present, noting the irony that Dr Anthony Fauci recently invoked the Fifth Amendment some 80 years on, and that films in the retrospective inadvertently echo what he called the "destructive policies" of the current US administration.
- Locarno retrospective revisits Hollywood's anti-communist blacklist era
- Curator Ehsan Khoshbakht calls the blacklist "a plague" on the industry
- He draws parallels to present-day political intolerance and hysteria
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Hollywood's "Red Scare" blacklist ran from the late 1940s into the 1950s, when the US film industry, under pressure from Congress and anti-communist campaigners, refused to employ anyone suspected of Communist Party ties or sympathies. Writers, directors and actors who declined to answer investigators' questions, or to name colleagues, often found themselves unable to work under their own names, and some left America altogether to continue their careers abroad.
The Locarno Film Festival, held annually in Switzerland, is one of the world's oldest film festivals and is known for pairing new releases with historical retrospectives. Its 2026 programme, curated by writer and film historian Ehsan Khoshbakht, revisits this period through the work of blacklisted figures such as Dalton Trumbo, John Garfield, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright and Charles Chaplin, alongside directors including Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield.
The story matters because it uses this history to raise questions, still debated today, about political pressure on artists, loyalty tests and the human cost of being forced out of one's profession for one's beliefs or associations.