1984 version of 1984 in theaters for 1 day

George Orwell’s 1984, the 1949 novel about a totalitarian future society watched over by an authoritarian Big Brother, climbed to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list in January after President Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway defended false claims about the inauguration crowd as merely “alternative facts.”

Now the movie version is coming back, for one day.

1984 has actually been made into a film twice, the first time (1956) as a black and white British sci-fi that starred Edmond O’Brien as protagonist Winston Smith, with Donald Pleasence, Jan Sterling and Michael Redgrave in supporting roles.

The one that’s heading back to more than 180 theaters in the United States (along with five in Canada, one in England and one in Sweden) on Tuesday is technically known as Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It stars the late John Hurt as Smith, a propagandist tasked with rewriting history to align with the dictates of the Party. (It is also the last screen appearance of Richard Burton, who plays party member O’Brien.) The film was was released in, well, 1984. At the time, it was well-received by critics, most of whom preferred it to the earlier version. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote that it “penetrates much more deeply into the novel’s heart of darkness” than the previous adaptation, and called Hurt “the perfect Winston Smith.”

Theaters in 165 cities and 43 states will host the screenings as part of a joint effort by the Art House Convergence and United State of Cinema organizations. (As of press time, the only Arkansas theater that has confirmed it will be showing the film is Little Rock’s Riverdale 10. The film will screen at 7 p.m. For more information go to riverdale10.com.)

“A lot of us have felt that [with] the current administration, a lot of our most essential values are sort of under assault,” Dylan Skolnick, co-director of Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, N.Y., and one of the organizers of the national screening, told the Los Angeles Times. “In particularly, things like the existence of actual facts. And 1984 has had this sudden uptick in popularity because it really explores a lot of those issues.”

The timing of the screenings is not random: April 4 is the date of the first entry in Smith’s resistance diary, which opens: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures [its] own facts, demands total obedience and demonizes foreign enemies has never been timelier,” a news release for the event stated, adding that the screenings encourage theaters “to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings and the simple truth that there are no such things as ‘alternative facts.’”