The Anti-Communist Film Festival wants people like Paul Roland. In 2003, Roland released a film he wrote, produced, directed and stars in. It’s called Exemplum. Shot in black and white, the film tells the story of a priest whose obsession with social media fame leads him into a spiritual spiral. It’s Breaking Bad set in a California parish.
Exemplum was made for $10,000. “There’s plenty of promise here that will warrant keeping an eye on Roland,” reviewer Douglas Davidson wrote, “mostly because there’s a daring here to ask big questions within an institution that’s overgrown past its intended purpose. That institutions far too often seek to preserve themselves rather than the ideas that spawned them and they tend to attract like-minded individuals thereby perpetuating problems instead of remaining malleable and within-purpose. Exemplum isn’t afraid to point out the frailty of community constitution and what it looks like when that’s taken advantage of. This makes Exemplum worth ruminating on; this makes what next big question Roland seeks to explore interesting.”
Critic Christian Toto offered this: “Exemplum offers something meatier for secular and faith-based audiences alike. Its protagonist’s flaws are obvious, but his journey is both fresh and inviting. You haven’t seen a story like this before, and that’s refreshing.”
Roland’s the kind of young filmmaker I want represented at the Anti-Communist Film Festival. The idea for the festival came to me last year. In years of attending film festivals I’d accumulated a list of great anti-communist films—The Lives of Others, Trial, Night People, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Why not show them all over the course of a weekend and throw a big party? I soon found a sponsor in the Victims of Communism Foundation and we were off and running. We’re planning it for the fall and there will be an official announcement soon.
Roland is a supporter and advisor. I became friends with the filmmaker when Exemplum came out and I gave it a positive review. Roland, 32, lives in Pasadena. He’s married with a young daughter and is working on a new project, a fictional podcast called Punch the Line. He describes it as “a multi-episode fictional podcast that is a coming-of-age teenage dramedy in the spirit of John Hughes and Cameron Crowe.”
We’ve had several discussions about so-called “conservative” film and how bad so much of it is. The holy-roller studios keep making Jesus movies, and the Daily Wire can’t move past the damsel-in-distress-on-the-prairie trope. Why go see Reagan when you can experience Project Hail Mary? Chuck Norris was an icon and his movies were essential to the fight against communism. Yet in addition to honoring his legacy we also want to present the next generation of pro-freedom filmmakers, artists who may have a different, more subtle and complex vision than classics like Invasion U.S.A.
We also want young people to be free. Between the born-again tight-asses and the woke, Generations Z and Y are scared of their own shadows. They don’t have the muscle needed to make Taxi Driver, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or The Lives of Others. We want to encourage them to re-learn courageous filmmaking. We want someone with the guts to make The Devil’s Triangle.
Roland’s the kind of imaginative young filmmaker the Anti-Communist Film Festival wants to attract. Someone with a unique and intelligent vision who also shows signs of aesthetic excellence in making a movie. Also, tenacity. “Exemplum came with great difficulty,” Roland told me recently. “After getting the initial funds in early-2020, the pandemic hit. Then, several months later, my wife became pregnant with our beloved daughter. Then, immediately after, a negligent neighbor broke a water main and flooded our unit, so throughout all of principal photography, my wife and I were bouncing between Airbnb’s while our condo underwent repairs. The only two words that best describe the experience: chaos and nightmare.”
Despite everything, he says, “and with the help of incredible friends, including my cinematographer (Vlad Ionescu), composer (Andrew Halpin), and producers (Joe Goodwin and J.F. Haggard), I persisted to the finish line. I wore several hats on set, regularly shifting between director, actor, set decorator, location manager, craft services, etc.”
“The day-to-day shoots were grueling,” he adds. "These were back-to-back 12-13 hour days with multiple set-ups in various locations. I had nothing left in me at the end of each day and I had to wake up at five a.m. the next day to start it all over. In truth, I loved every minute of it. I felt alive. To make movies, you have to love the experience of being on-set and solving problems with the people around you, and, if I'm being entirely honest, I miss the intensity a bit.”
Roland and I are Catholic and love films with Catholic themes—even if the characters are flawed. “Without mystery and doubt,” Roland says, “we would have no faith. Exploring faith or moral concepts derived from faith means exploring the distance between God and Man. As St. Augustine rightly noted, civilization will always be a mind of its own, going toward God or away from God at any given moment in time, while being gently guided by God's grace. True Christian storytelling (even of a secular brand) wanders the valley between saints and sinners, between righteousness and depravity, between certainty and absurdity. Christian storytelling respects the complexity of humanity, understanding that goodness sometimes comes in confusing packages while evil sometimes appears pristine and pure. To be a Christian storyteller is to be in love with the human soul, exploring its propensity for greatness and great evil.”