filmmakers exhausted – At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, filmmakers and festivalgoers from across the world described a familiar kind of burnout: disgust, fatigue, and a sense that Trump’s reach has turned every conversation into a referendum. From a Turkish filmmaker’s blunt shock
It was hard to think about Donald Trump last week while relaxing in a comfortable chair 50 yards from the beach on the French Riviera. Still. as the glass in my hand warmed slightly in the sun—Côtes du Rhône. the kind of drink that makes a person linger on purpose—I caught a snippet of conversation on the sidewalk beside a beach that. by all accounts. was “clothing optional.”.
“Did you hear what he said?” a woman asked, impeccably dressed in a red and black chiffon evening gown.
“What?” replied the man, wearing a Brion Tuxedo with a claret-colored cummerbund.
“’Six genders. Real hater on Jesus,’” the woman said, quoting Trump’s attack on James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas. She added that Trump mispronounced “vegan” as “vagan.”
“Enough. Please . . .” the man said.
By the time the couple had drifted out of earshot, the words stayed with me—less as outrage than as evidence of something stubborn and spreading: fatigue. Not just political fatigue at home, but a kind of exhaustion that follows Trump into places where he doesn’t belong.
I was in Cannes to attend the 79th annual film festival with “The First 100. ” a documentary I produced that chronicles the first hundred days of Trump’s second term. Along with our executive producer. Greg Wagner of “Law and Order. ” we screened the film outside of competition to an enthusiastic group of filmmakers from around the world. They came to talk about cinema. They ended up talking about the president anyway.
Cannes can feel like two worlds stitched together—super-rich filmmakers and A-list celebrities taking smaller boats to shore. docking. and returning to parties thrown from “floating fortresses. ” alongside working-class filmmakers who hunt for invitations that aren’t coming easily. Everyone else—those staying in hotels on the beach and villas in the surrounding countryside—walk through small shops and restaurants looking for a way in. The festival, for all its glamour, functions as a microcosm of society.
There was one exception. Nearly everyone at the festival seemed well educated, well traveled, and—again and again—tired of hearing about Trump.
People would say they didn’t want to talk about him. They would then talk about him anyway, from the bars near the festival venue to the largest super yacht. Even those who said Trump couldn’t be avoided often couldn’t stop measuring every conversation against his latest insult.
The familiar American instinct—distraction through insistence—showed up, too. The rich and powerful in America who oppose Trump are well known. and Trump diminishes their criticisms by saying the country’s rank-and-file love him. On Wednesday. the president claimed 99% of the people in Israel love him. and said he could be prime minister there if he wanted to.
In Cannes, that kind of certainty landed like noise.
“I am so tired of him,” a young filmmaker from Turkey said, finishing the sentence by observing he’d never seen anyone as repulsive and despotic as Trump. “And I’m from Turkey!”
Then there was an outlier—Ainsley, a Floridian celebrating her birthday by traveling to Cannes and partying with festival goers. With the required tan and Mar-a-Lago face. she looked like she belonged to the cheerleading section before she even declared so before a crowd outside of Le Majestic hotel. She called herself “MAGA for life.”.
But her reaction to Trump was anger, not loyalty.
“He lied. He lied to us all. He’s part of the deep state. I’m tired of his lies and I’m tired of talking about him. He has to go,” she said.
Ainsley went further, defining the deep state as a group of greedy billionaires, including Trump, who want to “replace” white people in Ukraine and the United States with a “lower species.”
“Lower species?” I asked her. “Like cats and dogs?”
What she said afterward is not something I’m repeating here.
Her anger was rooted, she said, in America’s economy and the wars in Iran and Ukraine. “The economy ‘absolutely sucks,’” she said. She described Trump as promising everything would “magically get better” when the war was over. adding: “I just don’t believe him. He started one war and said he’d end the other [in Ukraine] and he lied. We were all fooled.”.
And then came the detail that felt personal even in a conversation full of politics: she said what bothered her most was “losing good MAGA members like Greene and Thomas Massie.” According to Ainsley, the president is “replacing MAGA with pure Trumpers.”
It sounded, in her telling, like a movement being eaten from the inside.
Earlier. the conversation returned to a theme that’s been haunting American politics for years: people believe they weren’t being heard. As former first lady Michelle Obama recently said. many MAGA members followed Trump because they thought they weren’t being heard. Ainsley’s version of that betrayal was blunt. “He said he cared. He said he listened. He didn’t mean any of it. He used me.”.
The burnout didn’t stop at national lines.
A young actor born in the Midwest said she had left the United States because she was “just done with it all.” She wanted a life without “worshipping at the altar of hatred” she saw in the United States. She had second thoughts when she realized she couldn’t book acting gigs overseas since she was an American.
“I was told on a couple of occasions that I wouldn’t get the job because the company didn’t want to hire Americans,” she said. She then worked to get dual German citizenship. “Now, thankfully, I am employable.”
For Anthony, a filmmaker from Italy, the Trump era felt like grief rather than argument. “It is like mourning the loss of a parent. You come to love America, its culture, and you see one man killing it. I love America.”
Luiz. a French cab driver ferrying festivalgoers around Cannes. said he loves talking with Americans and described his ability to do impersonations of both a Long Island accent and a Southern drawl. But he doesn’t like to talk about Trump. “It is very painful,” he said. “Americans love to talk and so do I. [They] are very friendly. Russians?. They never smile. Americans do.”.
Yet even in that pain, the admiration for America’s cultural gravity remained. In Cannes. there’s a mural of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in the 1921 film “The Kid” gracing the front of a prominent building. The official posters for this year’s festival feature Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis from “Thelma and Louise.”.
That love for the United States frustrated those outside the country who had expected it to represent freedom and diversity. It was also the reason the exhaustion felt so intense—because it wasn’t only about politics. It was about identity.
As the Turkish filmmaker put it, the American reality is “run by a despot worse than Putin or President Erdoğan.” He said, “I wanted to do a film about your country, but I wouldn’t watch it if I did. I couldn’t. It’s too painful and it’s like bad fiction.”
When people abroad describe U.S. politics as bad fiction, it suggests how far the story has drifted from normal life.
Some festivalgoers complained about the lack of political documentaries “focusing on Trump and authoritarianism that is rising around the world.” One Romanian festivalgoer said that. but she didn’t make one either. Many filmmakers said the problem wasn’t only creative—it was financial. Those who hold the purse strings don’t consider such filmmaking a good investment.
A British filmmaker explained the fear in plain terms. “Nobody likes Trump. but we’ve seen what he’s done to entertainment and the media in the states. ” he said. pointing to Trump’s lawsuits against CBS News. ABC and the Wall Street Journal. along with his attacks on late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.
“Nobody wants to put themselves in his crosshairs,” the filmmaker said.
The sense that even jokes come with consequences lingered as well, tied to a May 20 appearance on Colbert’s “Late Show,” where Bruce Springsteen said Colbert lost his job because Trump can’t take a joke.
After our screening of “The First 100,” a young filmmaker from a small town in rural Virginia said he “completely understands” how those outside of the United States feel. He described the mental whiplash of being forced to live inside someone else’s story.
“I wonder every day how this will end, and at the same time I’m sick of talking about it,” he said. In his hometown, “[w]e have a huge Trump store that sells his memorabilia. They want to rename the city after him. It’s like we’re all drunk from being around him.”
For those who’ve been around the president long enough, the fear isn’t only the hangover. It’s the fact that it never ends.
A German filmmaker added a different kind of pressure—lecturing me on America’s two-party system. “Your John Adams said you shouldn’t have any political parties. You have just two parties. That’s the American problem. You don’t have any choices. We have more political parties.”
Then he warned that the failures of the United States aren’t only about Trump. “I have traveled to festivals all over the world in the last few years. I don’t know that I can define why freedom is failing, but I see that it is — everywhere.”
The dread, for some, was rooted not just in ideology but in what they see in his temperament.
At a party sponsored by the State of Georgia’s film office, Black actors pointed to Trump’s inherent racism, misogyny and greed, as well as his transactional and narcissistic tendencies, as what feeds the dread. “But we’re so tired of it,” a 79-year old actor explained.
“We know what’s wrong and we know some people are trying to do something about it, but we’re numb. We’re hit with it every damn day. When people ask me if I like Trump — because I won’t talk about him much — I say ‘hell to the NO.’ I just need a break. Hell, we all do.”
By the time I left the festival screenings and walked back toward Mougins—an artist’s village just outside of Cannes—the exhaustion had become something quieter but harder to shake.
Maybe that’s the reason people from a variety of cities, states and countries want to take a breath. They still want accountability. They still want the stakes faced. But the room for living—regular life, the kind where a president isn’t the main topic of conversation—feels narrower every day.
I asked a server in a small restaurant in Mougins if Trump was often a topic of discussion there. “Thfffpt,” the waiter exclaimed, sticking out his tongue and making a sound that sounded like “Aack.”
He said Mougins was a home for poets and artists that had endured for centuries.
“Trump is a fool,” he told me. “If we survived Napoleon and Hitler we can survive a fat man with a bad haircut from America.”
Donald Trump Cannes Film Festival The First 100 James Talarico Texas Senate candidate James Talarico attack Trump lawsuits Stephen Colbert Jimmy Kimmel Susan Sarandon Geena Davis Charlie Chaplin Jackie Coogan State of Georgia film office