Two libertarian films — The Promise, and Citizen Jane: Battle for the City — open on April 21st.
Don’t judge The Promise by it’s online ratings. The film, which tells the story of the Armenian Holocaust, is getting trolled in a big way by deniers, possibly backed by the Turkish government. Per the Washington Post, “The Promise doesn’t officially open in theaters until Friday. But on IMDb, a website where people can rate movies, the film has received more than 120,000 ratings — nearly 62,000 of them the lowest: one-star.” Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish government, but the latter has organized a concerted effort to deny that. This is the first major film to break through the stonewalling.
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is a documentary about Jane Jacobs, a journalist who discovered spontaneous order in city development — and who fought to a standstill NYC’s vision of a bulldozed, centrally-planned urban landscape. About her the Mises Institute wrote: “The conclusions she reached…were remarkably similar to those Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek had reached earlier by different routes. A city is, at base, a marketplace. It is a spontaneous order. It cannot be planned. The people who try to plan cities have failed above all because they have not comprehended the way the spontaneous order of cities works.”