Ayn Rand was born on February 2nd, 1905. Novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter — Rand did what no one had done before: she took the ideas of classical liberalism into the world of stories and dreams, portraying the entrepreneurial heroes of our unprecedented prosperity as just that, and to the absolute horror of enemies of freedom. Decades after her death, Ayn Rand is still called “the most dangerous woman in America.” So strong is her influence in libertarian film that she has her own category on this website.
The best film resulting from her works is We the Living. It’s a fitting tribute to the universally anti-authoritarian nature of her ideas that this film — first produced in fascist Italy as an attack on communism — was then banned at the angry insistence of the Nazis, who considered it antifascist. They were both right.