Reel Streaming: A Century of Protest Films That Shook the World
- andreasachs1
- Aug 1
- 5 min read
By Laurence Lerman / New York City
From the dawn of the 20th century to the dystopian explosions of the future, protest films have long served as one of cinema’s most passionate battle cries. They remind us that art doesn't just imitate life—it ponders it, challenges it, shouts at it, and occasionally lights a Molotov cocktail beneath it. The same can be said of the very real protests that have erupted around the country over the past six months.
At their core, protest films are stories of resistance. They are about people pushing back on behalf of issues that are political, social, and cultural: against corrupt governments and systemic injustice; against environmental degradation; against racism, sexism, and classism: and against the apathy that frequently surrounds such issues. Protest films span all genres—thrillers, dramas, comedies, romances, action films, even science fiction—and emerge from every corner of the globe. And while the urgency of their messages may differ, they all share a demand to be heard.
To enter a discussion about narrative protest cinema (we’ll let someone else track the ever-expanding universe of protest documentaries) is to start, fittingly, with a revolution. Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin—the pioneering Soviet filmmaker’s first feature-length efforts, both released in 1925—are foundational not just to this genre, but to film itself. These were not polite critiques; they were cinematic uprisings, with Strike portraying a brutal factory revolt in pre-revolutionary Russia and Potemkin depicting a mutiny aboard a battleship that spills into the blood-soaked streets of Odessa. Eisenstein’s montage techniques were as radical as his politics, turning the discipline of film editing into an aggressive weapon all its own.
Jump forward to The Battle of Algiers (1966), Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s gripping docudrama that chronicles Algeria’s fight for independence from French colonial rule. Banned in France for years, it remains one of the most viscerally charged depictions of insurgency ever put to film. In a similar spirit, Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) follows a fictionalized account of political assassination and its aftermath in Greece. Inspired by the killing of Greek politician and activist Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 and the turmoil left in its wake, the hard-hitting thriller was made while the real-life regime behind the government cover-up still held power, which only deepens its audacity and authenticity.
Protest films aren’t just about bullets and ballot boxes—some of the most memorable and effective are deeply personal pieces. From 2008, Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Oscar-winning Sean Penn, tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, and his fight for gay rights. The movie’s pride and sense of solidarity was similarly felt six years later in British filmmaker Matthew Warchus’s aptly named Pride, which concerns an unlikely alliance between striking Welsh miners and London queer activists.
American filmmakers have frequently confronted the country’s demons in their work, particularly when it concerns the Sixties’ frequently protested issues of civil rights and the Vietnam War. Ava Duvernay’s Selma (2014) and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) dive deep into the former, offering portraits of leaders whose legacies still continue to thunder over the decades. Lee, never a stranger to protest cinema, kept it going with Get on the Bus (1996), which follows a group of Black men traveling to the Million Man March, their conversations capturing the kaleidoscope of Black male identity and activism in America. And in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Oliver Stone turned his lens on Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, chronicling his journey from patriotic soldier to anti-war crusader—a protest film born from disillusionment.
Then there’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), Aaron Sorkin’s glossy, rapid-fire dramatization of 1969’s high-profile trial of anti-Vietnam War protesters including Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. Sorkin’s dialogue crackles, the stakes are high, and the parallels to modern-day crackdowns on dissenters are impossible to ignore. Its spiritual forebear, Haskell Wexler’s way-cool Medium Cool (1969) uses cinéma verité-styled filmmaking techniques to blend fiction with real footage of the explosive 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in its story of a seemingly hardened TV news cameraman dealing with his own ethical and social dilemmas.
The genre’s reach extends even into the futuristic and fantastical. V for Vendetta (2005), directed by James McTeigue from a screenplay by the Wachowskis. It wraps its anarchic message in a Guy Fawkes mask and dystopian aesthetics, imagining a fascist totalitarian Britain of tomorrow. Terry Gilliam satirizes a more organized but still oppressive kind of Orwellian bureaucratic madness with his trademark visual flair in his 1985 masterpiece Brazil. Even Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) (the toughest and most serious-minded big-screen Star Wars installment, if I may be so bold) offers up a gritty resistance tale about those fighting for a cause, showing that a Terran-styled rebellion can also be found a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And the movie’s serialized Disney+ TV prequel Andor, created by Rogue One scribe Tony Gilroy, is even better.
And then some films march quietly. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera 1984 novel, offers an intimate romance set against the backdrop of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, where acts of resistance are as personal as they are political. Ditto for 1981’s Reds, director/star Warren Beatty’s epic passion project in which American journalist/activists John Reed and Louise Bryant’s romance plays out alongside Russia’s October Revolution of 1917.
Four decades-plus later, the protest tradition continues. Alex Garland’s much lauded Civil War (2024), featuring Kirsten Dunst as a jaded war photographer, offers a provocative look at a fragmented secessionist America on the brink. Whether it’s speculative or all-too-real, the film speaks to a modern audience already acquainted with polarization, unrest, and the dangerous thrill of collapse.
Protest is not its own genre; it’s a throughline. It can be loud, or quiet. It can punch through walls or whisper in corners, but it’s always there. And at its most formidable movies and their creators don’t just reflect the world—they offer their own take on it without feeling any obligation to accept it as it is.
So as long as there are voices silenced, freedoms threatened, and systems in need of breaking, there will be directors, writers, and actors picking up the torch—and their cameras—to spread the word.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.
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