Ali Abbasi's Film 'The Apprentice' Selected for Competition at Cannes Festival; A Work About Young Donald Trump

The film 'The Apprentice' directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker, has been selected as one of the works in the main competition section of the 77th Cannes Film Festival. The Cannes Film Festival announced the names of the films participating in this year's event on Thursday, April 12. Thierry Frémaux and Iris Knobloch, the director and president of the festival, unveiled this year's films during a press conference in Paris. According to Thierry Frémaux, this collection was selected from over two thousand submitted films, and the recent Hollywood strike did not significantly impact the overall process of this cinematic event. Notable figures in the main competition section of the festival include Francis Ford Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Paul Schrader, and Paolo Sorrentino. Iris Knobloch and Thierry Frémaux stated that this year, Iranian cinema has no representative in this section, and no film from this country made it to the final list. This trend follows the recent suppression of widespread protests and the ongoing censorship and repression of independent Iranian filmmakers by the Islamic Republic, leading global festivals to show reluctance to screen works from the government's cinema. However, the film 'The Apprentice' by Ali Abbasi is one of the works present in the main competition section of the festival. This film, featuring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, and Martin Donovan, depicts part of the youth of Donald Trump, the former President of the United States. The story revolves around the early business activities of Donald Trump in the 1970s and 1980s in New York, focusing on his economic relationships with a controversial lawyer named Roy Cohn. The screenplay of 'The Apprentice' was initially written by Gabriel Sherman, and Ali Abbasi later joined the project as director. 'The Apprentice' is the title of a reality television program that Donald Trump hosted and produced, which aired for 15 seasons in the United States and many countries worldwide. Ali Abbasi is a well-known name at the Cannes Festival, and his previous film 'Holy Spider' received significant acclaim from critics and audiences two years ago. Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, a prominent Iranian actress, won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance in this film, which depicted religious murders in the city of Mashhad. The 77th Cannes Film Festival will begin on May 15 in France.