In a blitz on the management of the Trump administration, the US State Department’s Hollywood post base is offline. The American Film Showcase website is a global cultural and diplomatic partnership between the agency and the University of Southern California’s proud School of Film and Arts. Its Instagram and Facebook accounts have been deactivated.
what happened?
On Monday afternoon, an agency spokesman assured Hollywood reporters that AFS “continued to be a State Department program and activities are ongoing.” A spokesperson for the USC School of Cinematic Arts said that all programs funded by the State Department’s Department of Education and Culture have been reviewed to ensure an executive order that includes public online presence (President Donald Trump). There’s one,” he added.
Earlier on Monday, Trump expelled board members who were appointed Democrats in support of loyalists from Washington’s federally funded Kennedy Arts Center. “There’s no more drug shows or any other anti-American propaganda,” he wrote on social media. The move is a key pillar of the country’s soft power, the US international development agency, by a highly-received task force piloted by billionaire Trump Ally Elon Musk. It happens in the breakdown.
The think tank, USC’s public diplomacy center, describes AFS as “a unique cultural diplomacy initiative screening provocative (and often important) documentaries overseas.” The AFS began in 2012 during President Trump Bete Noir’s first term in office. The organization’s focus on the topic of social justice could possibly oppose the political and policy interests of the so-called “America-First” right-wing movement.
AFS Director Rachel Gandin Mark has been running the program since its inception. She told Indiewire in 2015 that she selected the project to be “impowering women and girls, empowering youth, civil society, diversity, rights for people with disabilities, LGBT rights, environment and more. I often touch on it.” To this end, films often screen at the US embassy, such as chasing ice, climate change, lawsuits in Mongolia, or lawsuits over LGBTQ+ rights in Estonia.
AFS Envoys, who are sent abroad to hold workshops and hold international delegations in Los Angeles, receives Oscars and Emmy awards, such as editor Ephraim Kirkwood (1619 Project), and director Bing Liu. veterans from the entertainment industry include a diverse array of diverse arrays (Minding the Minding the Minding the Minding the Minding Gap), and director Frida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: a strong, clear vision) .
“Our programming serves a wide range of American policy goals, including promoting freedom of speech and a creative economy,” a spokesperson for the USC School of Cinematic Arts said in a statement to THR. Masu. “Our work is a number of things that aim to build friendly and peaceful relationships between the people of the United States and people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports and professional interactions. It’s one of the outreach programs.”
AFS Headmark, who founded the Arab Film Festival in LA in 2018 and served as a creative consultant for the Screenwriter Lab at the Sundance Institute in Jordan, is a program sponsored by a department in another state through USC. has begun. The goal is to improve the career of an Arabic TV writer. According to USC, there are no changes to the MEMI status.
With federal grants of around $2 million a year, AFS was the successor to Cold War-era efforts that long promoted American values and refuted global adversaries. Previous efforts mix strategic support from the Hollywood Studios Project with government-generated films. Some industry partners remain constant. Walt Disney helped its attempts to improve its relationship with Latin America, known as the Good Neighbor Policy, by releasing the 1943 Sardos Amigos and the 1944 The Three Caballeros. In 2023, Walt Disney Animation Studios partnered with the US Embassy in Jakarta to discuss Southeast Asia, Oscar nominated Raya, the first feature inspired by the Last Dragon. (Indonesia is a key buffer against China’s influence in the region.)
USC is well versed in its film schools’ list of Thr’s ranked programs, considered the most honorable in the country, and has maintained many long-standing federal partnerships for research and other initiatives. It’s there. These include cooperation with NASA, FEMA, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Institutes of Health and the National Maritime and Atmospheric Administration.
