Anyone coming to the Berlin Film Festival hoping to escape the non-stop onslaught of Donald Trump was out of luck. The great orange one likely wouldn’t be caught dead on the Berlinale red carpet (unless of course, they invited him), but Trump was still everywhere in Berlin.
On screen, directors took potshots at the 47th U.S. President and his policies — Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi satire Mickey 17 features crazed followers of an egotistical man-child politician who wears bright red, MAGA-style ball caps; Michel Franco’s Dreams, about a Mexican ballet dancer who crosses the border to be with his wealthy U.S. girlfriend, is a direct indictment of Trump’s immigration edicts — and among the execs here for the European Film Market, the topic of Trump and his impact on the international film industry is impossible to avoid.
Production and sales companies fear that Trump could target the film industry with tariffs and trade restrictions, as he has done, or threatened to do, with other industries. A possible target could be U.S. productions that choose to shoot outside the country. Such runaway production has become commonplace as the cost of shooting films in the U.S. has soared.
“Everyone’s just been asking each other: Is it going to be OK to shoot in Mexico or Canada? There’s no way to know,” says Josh Rosenbaum of Waypoint Entertainment, a production and financing group that’s backed such films as Longlegs, Mid90s and The Favourite. “Frankly, it’s chaos. There are no rules. Obviously you have these edicts [from Trump] but no one knows what it’s going to mean.”
Several aspects of the international film industry could potentially draw Trump’s ire. The issue of runaway production is complicated by the generous tax credits offered by many countries to attract U.S. films and series to shoot there, potentially taking jobs away from American casts and crews. Many countries also heavily subsidize their own films and series, something that Trump could point to as “unfair competition” and target with restrictions or tariffs.
The U.S. industry has long been pushing for similar home-grown tax relief to counter the appeal of shooting outside the country. Ahead of last year’s elections, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed doubling the state’s tax incentives for film and television production to $750 million a year, in an effort to bring back jobs lost to out-of-state and out-of-country productions. After the devastation of the L.A. fires, however, the state government is understandably more focused on rebuilding the city than subsidizing Hollywood. There’s been a push for tax relief or production incentives at the federal level, but, under a Trump government, it seems unlikely that Washington would push through policies that heavily favor the deep blue states of New York and California.
Up north, in the region that Trump has begun to refer to as the 51st state, the Toronto Film Festival is already making plans to resist. TIFF will be launching an official content market next year and has already named the first members of an advisory committee, including indie industry heavyweights such as CAA’s Roeg Sutherland, Goodfellas CEO Vincent Maraval, Elevation Pictures co-president Noah Segal, and Rhombus Media founder Niv Fichman.
“TIFF has always been a place of international collaboration and cooperation,” Judy Lung, TIFF’s vp, strategy, communications and stakeholder relations, told THR in Berlin. In this coming period “of political and economic upheaval,” she noted, it’s important for Canada’s premier film event to “deepening and strengthening our international ties.”
A more pressing concern is the issue of censorship, particularly self-censorship, of companies in the wake of the MAGA-wave.
“We’ve seen this sort of yielding in advance, as with all the various DEI programs that just fell like dominoes, and corporations, companies and people thinking: ‘I’ll start passively [and] then start thinking of a long game,” director Todd Haynes, president of this year’s Berlinale jury, told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about the Trump government. “But I think what we’ve learned historically is that once you start to yield, they don’t reward you for submission. These kinds of people are insatiable.”
Yielding could also take the form of avoiding films or subjects likely to draw the ire of Trump and his minions. Here the experience of Ali Abassi’s Trump biopic The Apprentice could prove an instructive one. The feature, which premiered to rave reviews and an eight-minute standing ovation in Cannes last year, and has become an awards breakout, scoring two Oscar nominations for Sebastian Stan, playing Trump, and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, the Svengali lawyer who taught the future president the political dark arts back in the 1980s. But opposition from Trump’s camp nearly killed the film’s chances in the U.S.. Just as The Apprentice was bowing on the Croisette, reports emerged that the film’s principal financier, Kinematics — founded by producer Mark Rapaport, son-in-law of the billionaire and known Trump donor Dan Snyder — didn’t like Abbasi’s take on the once and future president. No one would touch the film. It was only after Tom Ortenberg’s maverick indie outfit Briarcliff Entertainment made an offer, and one of the film’s producers, James Shani, came on board as a full co-distributor, that The Apprentice made it to U.S. screens.
Reached by email, Shani noted that The Apprentice still doesn’t have a streaming deal in the U.S. “I believe we’re the only Oscar-nominated film that doesn’t and it’s objectively clear why,” he wrote. “And that’s a problem.”
The Apprentice experience may serve as a warning for producers and filmmakers in Berlin: You cross Trump at your peril.
“There’s a real fear that U.S. distributors will back away from anything the feels anti-Trump or MAGA-critical,” one European sales agent tells THR. “Even films about immigration or trans rights could be considered too risky.”