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The Apprentice bandwagon has rolled into Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Screen has confirmed Briarcliff Entertainment has scheduled a private screening at the festival on Thursday evening.
The Donald Trump feature directed by Ali Abbasi arrives from Telluride Film Festival where it played to a packed house days after Briarcliff set an October 11 release in the United States, a little over three weeks before Trump will contest the US presidential election on November 5.
It screens at 7pm local time at TIFF Lightbox for press and tastemakers.
On Wednesday the film’s producers said they had surpassed within 12 hours the initial goal of raising $100,000 via a Kickstarter campaign launched the previous day. The money will mostly be used to fund marketing efforts in support of a wide release of the dramatised account of Trump’s formative relationship with mentor Roy Cohn in the 1970s and 1980s.
According to the official page of ‘Release The Apprentice’, the campaign stood at more than $150,000 at time of writing on Wednesday evening – with 24 days to go.
Last week the film’s executive producer James Shani of Rich Spirit cleared a path for the release when he bought out Kinematics’s stake in the film. Dan Snyder, the billionaire Trump donor and former owner of the Washington Commanders American Football team, part-owns Kinematics and was said to have been upset over the tone of The Apprentice and tried to block it.
In late May Trump’s lawyers also tried to thwart a US release when they sent the filmmakers a cease and desist letter shortly after the world premiere in Cannes. The filmmakers shot back that The Apprentice was “a fair and balanced portrait” of the former president.
In one scene in the film, Trump is seen raping Ivana, his first wife, played by Maria Bakalova. Ivana Trump initially referred to the 1989 incident as rape, and spoke about it the couple’s divorce a year later. Several years later she said she did not want her words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense. She died in 2022.
Rocket Science handles international sales. The Apprentice will open in France through Metropolitan on October 9 and in the UK through Studiocanal on October 18.
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