Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo was among the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. When the hunt for communists began after the war he appeared before the congressional committee, refused to answer, and went to prison. Then came the blacklist: Mexico, no money, his children shunned at school, and years of writing under other people's names. What recognition he got back came late and came incomplete. Peter Askin builds the documentary around Trumbo's letters, read aloud by actors, with his children and friends filling in around them. Archive photographs and newsreels sit between. What it describes is not only a period of censorship but what it means to keep a family together in a country where informing on your neighbour has become ordinary.