The 79th Locarno Film Festival will mount a retrospective of more than 50 films examining Hollywood's left-wing film-makers and the industry blacklist that shattered their careers, running August 5–15, 2026 in the Swiss lakeside town.

Titled "Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist," the program spans fiction features, documentaries, shorts, and newsreels. It is curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, who told The Hollywood Reporter it is "the timeliest" retrospective he has ever worked on. The program is produced in partnership with Cinémathèque Suisse and with the support of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The Hollywood Reporter

Khoshbakht drew a direct line between the blacklist era and the present. He told THR that current White House press releases use phrases "right out of the McCarthy playbook," citing the terms "the radical Left" and "radical propaganda" — language that echoes the 1940s and 1950s congressional investigations into alleged communist influence in the American film industry. The blacklist, as that period is known, saw hundreds of writers, directors, and actors driven from work, some for decades.

The film selection stretches across the full arc of that history. Lewis Milestone's The North Star (1943) and Clifford Odets' None But the Lonely Heart (1944) sit on the pre-blacklist side; Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947) and Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) capture the squeeze as Washington closed in. Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York (1957), made in exile, and Martin Ritt's The Front (1976), a comic look at the era's wreckage from a director who lived through it, extend the story into later decades. Thom Andersen and Noël Burch's Red Hollywood (1996), a critical essay film, reframes the whole period for a generation that never knew it.

Festival-goers who want to go deeper can take home a companion book of the same title, priced at CHF 35.00 from the festival's official shop. A six-part podcast series, "Red & Black: Hollywood's Blacklist," is also available, tracing the rise and fall of the blacklist across as many episodes. Locarno Film Festival

The retrospective has already had a first outing. It debuted at Triennale Milano on July 10, 2026, with a screening of Broken Arrow. The previous evening, the festival held a reveal event at Luma Westbau in Zurich presenting the full Locarno79 lineup, including a conversation between the festival's artistic director and film critic Paolo Mereghetti on the retrospective's themes. Locarno Film Festival

Khoshbakht is a familiar presence at Locarno. He curated the 2024 retrospective "The Lady with the Torch," a tribute to Columbia Pictures, and follows the 2025 edition's "Great Expectations," devoted to British postwar cinema. Each year's retrospective has become a cornerstone of the festival's identity — a curated argument as much as a film series.

For Locarno's audience, "Red & Black" offers a chance to see rare 35mm prints of films that are difficult to find on any streaming service, projected in one of Europe's most distinctive festival settings.