A B-movie sci-fi film that’s looking to get acquired at this month’s Cannes Film Festival has a pretty eye-catching poster, one seemingly inspired by a certain Kathy Griffin bit from a couple of years ago.
When Women Rule the World, an American movie that’s showing and in the marketplace at Cannes, features a poster with a woman meant to resemble Melania Trump. Per The Hollywood Reporter, in the poster she is, “holding two decapitated heads. One is bloodied up to look like Trump in a Make America Great Again hat and a shaggy blond wig. The other, a gray-skinned, bug-eyed zombie.”
The film’s slogan? “Meet the First Lady of the Future with her Heads of State.”
When Women Rule The World was written and directed by Sheldon Silverstein – not to be confused with the famed children’s book author Shel Silverstein. In an interview with the Reporter, Silverstein described the current president of the United States as a “moron” and added that the film “has a consciousness and has something to say about what’s going on in the world.”
Judging by the trailer, the film, featuring an orange-haired villain, is a low-budget, particularly ham-handed parody of Trumpism.
Is this is a case of liberal Hollywood taking cheap shots at the president? Not really, mostly because When Women Rule The World isn’t a very Hollywood production. It looks like it was produced independently, completely outside the Hollywood studio system, with not a single recognizable name either on camera or behind it. The film stars Anna Hera, Chris Gooch, Francisco DeCun, and Sandra Glagle. Raise your hand if you know any of those names.
It’s the same dynamic that, in the 2013 Oscar season, had conservatives claiming that “Hollywood” had rejected the Bradley Cooper-starring war movie American Sniper, when that film was produced entirely within the Hollywood system, from a director, Clint Eastwood, who has been part of the Hollywood firmament since the early 1950s.
As an underdog indie film without recognizable actors that’s trying to come out of Cannes with a distribution deal, the producers of When Women Rule the World clearly needed to do something to get attention. It looks, from the media coverage, like what they did worked.
