American Reds (2016)

While documentary films often reveal the economic and social catastrophes that beset us, they also unconsciously illuminate a fundamental failing of our time-our incapacity to imagine an alternative future. This is why American Reds is a story for our times. The Communist Party USA, despite its grievous faults and failings, and its willful blindness to the tyranny of Soviet Union, still had vision of a better world. Communists recognized that the solution to America's social, political and economic injustices required a resolution of the contradictions of our society; and that this could not take place within the existing social order. Communists were aware that any concrete gains the Party made for working people and against racism and sexism could easily be retracted under the existing system. Equality, social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth require an alternative society, a new order of things. Thus it is that the battlefields on which American communists fought the inequities of American life remain the sites on which the exact same conflicts rage today racism, anti-unionism, unequal distribution of wealth, sexism and incipient fascism. American Reds is the first documentary to comprehensively examine the history and the contemporary relevance of the Communist Party USA. The story is primarily told by men and women who were once in the front lines of the Party's struggles, celebrated its triumph and suffered imprisonment from its ultimate defeat.