THE APPRENTICE

Join us for the film that kicked off the 5th season of TCFF Tuesdays.  Nearly 1000 of your friends and family packed the State Theatre to see this movie days before the rest of the country could.

This movie is not about Trump’s hit NBC reality show, The Apprentice. This audacious film is the origin story of Trump himself— when, he, Donnie Trump, still in his 20s, was “the apprentice.” Not on TV, but in real life, the actual apprentice to one of the most notorious, evil and conniving legal minds of the last century – Roy Cohn.

Friday, October 11th at 1pm, 4:30pm, 8:00pm
Saturday, October 12th at 1pm, 4:30pm, 8:00pm
Sunday, October 13th at 1pm, 4:30pm, 8:00pm

One of the best and most relevant dramas of the year. The film is set in contemporary Tehran during the 2022 women-led uprising following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died while in the custody of the government’s morality police after being picked up for wearing a loose headscarf. The story follows one middle-class family whose father, a state investigator filled with ambition to become a judge, must first please the judicial hierarchy by approving numerous death sentences each day. The family is torn apart by their opposing reactions to the government’s crackdown on the protesters, and the moral and psychic toll of the father’s role in the regime.
The film’s brilliant Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was honored by the Traverse City Film Festival in our second year, 2006, with our first “Salute to Iranian Cinema,” where we presented his film IRON ISLAND. Since then, he has served time in prison for making films critical of the government. Last year, he made this movie, THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG, in secret in Iran, and then fled to Europe after Iranian officials saw it and sentenced him to a flogging and 8 years in prison — simply for making this masterwork of cinema.
This movie — winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — is a searing political thriller. Outside in the streets you hear the distant chants of the public: “DOWN WITH THE THEOCRACY!” Theocracy throughout the world today is problematic. Whether it is the Supreme Leader ordering women to obey, or the Supreme Court ordering women to birth a baby they did not want, or a Supreme Bibi who calls his theocracy a “democracy” when in fact it is an apartheid regime with two sets of rules depending on whether you belong to the “right” religion. And if you belong to the “wrong” religion, well, there’s nothing like a few 2,000-pound bombs to get you in lockstep with the program we’d like you to follow.
This film could not have come at a more important time, and we hope to have the director joining us via Zoom at the screenings.

Tuesday, October 15th at 1pm & 7pm