Sunday 29 January at 4pm
City University, London £5 full price; £4 concessions
Weekly pass £25 full price; £20 concessions
UK 2011
Director: Anthony Baxter
Producer: Richard Phinney
Language: English Duration: 95 min
This David and Goliath story for the 21st century, a group of proud Scottish homeowners take on a celebrity tycoon. At stake is one of Britain’s very last stretches of wilderness.
The billionaire property developer Donald Trump has bought up hundreds of acres on the northeast coast of Scotland, best known to movie-lovers as the setting for the 1983 classic film Local Hero. And like the American oil tycoon played by Burt Lancaster, he needs to buy out a few more locals to make the deal come true.
In a land swimming with golf courses, Trump is going to build two more – alongside a 450-room hotel and 1,500 luxury homes. The trouble is, the land he has purchased occupies one of Europe’s most environmentally sensitive stretches of coast, described by one leading scientist as Scotland’s Amazon rain forest. And the handful of local residents don’t want it destroyed.
After the Scottish Government overturns its own environmental laws to give Trump the green light, the stage is set for an extraordinary summer of discontent, as the
bulldozers spring into action. Water and power is cut off, land disputes erupt, and some residents have thousands of tonnes of earth piled up next to their homes.
Complaints go ignored by the police, who instead arrest the film’s director, Anthony Baxter. Local exasperation comes to a surreal head as the now “Dr” Trump scoops up an honorary doctorate from a local university, even as his tractors turn wild, untouched dunes into fairways.
Told entirely without narration, You’ve Been Trumped captures the cultural chasm between the glamorous, jet-setting and media savvy Donald Trump and a deeply
rooted Scottish community, whose local dialect demands a liberal use of subtitles.
What begins as an often amusing clash of world views grows increasingly bitter and disturbing. For the tycoon, the golf course is just another deal, with a possible billion dollar payoff. For the residents, it represents the destruction of a globally unique landscape that has been the backdrop for their lives.
Q&A
After the screening, the film's director, Anthony Baxter, will discuss how he approached the story and took on the billionaire Donald Trump, and David Milne, a local resident who will explain what the situation is like now.
