1984 screened in protest against Trump

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

So begins George Orwell’s dystopian drama 1984, his 1949 novel that has surged in popularity since President Donald Trump took office in the United States this year.

The book climbed to the top spot of Amazon’s bestseller list in January after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway defended false claims about the inauguration crowd as merely “alternative facts.”

1984 has been made into a film on two occasions, first in 1956 and later in — you guessed it — 1984. The latter version is now heading back into theatres, this time as a pointed commentary on modern times.

On Tuesday, more than 180 arthouse theatres around the United States — along with five locations in Canada (including the Rio and Vancity in Vancouver), one in England and one in Sweden — will screen the film in protest against Trump’s administration. Theatres 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. “A lot of us have felt that with the current administration, a lot of our most essential values are under assault,” said Dylan Skolnick, co-director of Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York, and one of the organizers of the national screening. “In particular, 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 more recent film version of the book stars the late John Hurt as Winston Smith, a propagandist tasked with rewriting history to align with the dictates of the Party and its omniscient figurehead known as Big Brother. (The timing of the screenings is not random: April 4 is the date of the first entry in Smith’s resistance diary.)

“Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures its own facts, demands total obedience and demonizes foreign enemies has never been timelier,” a statement from the event’s organizers said.

The organizers said the screenings encourage theatres “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.’ ”