With the help of award-winning Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi (Oscar nominee and winner of the Un Certain Regarde Award and a European Film Prize for ‘Border’), it reaches cinemas The Apprentice (Trump’s Story), a biting exploration of the ins and outs of the American empire that unravels the rise to power of a young Donald Trump through a phasic deal with the influential right-wing lawyer and political manipulator Roy Cohn.
Premiered worldwide in Competition at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, it stars Emmy Nominee Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, Emmy Award winner Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Oscar Nominated Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife, Ivana. The screenplay is by Gabriel Sherman, author of the biography of Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News, The Loudest Voice in the Room, a bestseller in the New York Times.
The film is an exciting look at the mentor-protégé relationship that would eventually change U.S. and world history.
New York, 1970s. Determined to step out of the shadow of his powerful father and make a name for himself in the Manhattan real estate industry, the aspiring magnate Donald J. Trump is in the early days of his career when he meets the man who will become one of the most important figures of his life: the political manipulator Roy Cohn. This influential lawyer-who got convictions for espionage against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and investigated suspected communists along with Senator Joseph McCarthy-would change the life of Trump, and indirectly that of the US. Perceiving in young Donald a promise of future, he will teach his new acolyte how to amass wealth and power through deception, intimidation and media manipulation. The rest is history.
