Communist Cowboys

The Eastern Bloc’s “Ostern” filmmaking turned the mythology of the American Western on its head.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, the state-owned East German film studio DEFA produced 12 “Red Westerns,” so called for their socialist spin on the quintessential American genre. Known in their time as “Indianerfilme,” these campy masterpieces were shot all over Yugoslavia and, with few exceptions, starred the Serbian athlete Gojko Mitić as a heroic Native […]

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