Light Industry presents two powerful anti-fascist films produced during the Spanish Civil War: Frontier Films’s Heart of Spain and Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth.

Heart of Spain was Frontier's first completed project, made with an eye towards encouraging American blood donations for Spanish Loyalists then fighting against insurgent right-wing Nationalists. The film played for nearly two months in New York following a successful Hollywood premiere, and later toured North America as part of a road show promoting aid for the Republican cause, featuring two specially-decorated military ambulances that transported the film, a projection crew, and a nurse from town to town. In this way, the film was seen by some two million viewers in the 1930s, at the height of American support for the Popular Front.

Complementing Heart of Spain is the contemporaneous Spanish Earth. Ivens’s project was backed by a group of prominent American literary figures—among them Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway—and its goal was to stir up support for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which included hundreds of volunteer fighters from the US.

New York: Feb. 14 at Light Industry.