The Young Karl Marx

East Bay Opening Night - 7/27

"It sounds like Hebrew to me," is a rich industrialist's horrified reaction to the radical ideas espoused by twentysomething Karl Marx (August Diehl). A ten-year labor of love for activist writer and director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), this finely crafted period drama vividly brings to life events surrounding the August, 1844 meeting between Marx, a radical German journalist exiled to Paris, and Friedrich Engels, the rebellious son of a wealthy factory owner. After Marx lobs a few barbs at the dandified Engels, a revolutionary bromance is born. Their goal? To create a movement which goes beyond philosophizing and makes a world revolution. Within a few years, Marx and Engels founded the Communist League and wrote its defining document, the Communist Manifesto. Peck and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer spent a half decade researching the two towering figures of socialism, relying mostly on the letters exchanged between Engels, Marx and his dedicated wife Jenny (a luminous Vicky Krieps). In the film's finale, the exhausted, virtually unknown trio labor on the Manifesto's revisions by candlelight. Marx writes out the prophetic words, "A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of communism." A hundred years later, more than a third of the world's population was living under the banner of Marxism. –Thomas Logoreci

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