Amid the Trump administration’s blitz on executive branch operations, a Hollywood outpost of the U.S. State Department has gone offline. The website of American Film Showcase, a global cultural diplomacy partnership between the agency and the University of Southern California’s vaunted School of Cinematic Arts, is now unavailable — and its Instagram and Facebook accounts have been deactivated.
What’s going on?
On Monday afternoon, an agency spokesperson assured The Hollywood Reporter that AFS “continues to be a Department of State program and activities are ongoing.” Kristin Borella, an associate dean and head of communications at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, added that all programs funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs “are being reviewed to ensure compliance with [President Donald Trump’s] Executive Orders, including our public online presence.”
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Earlier Monday, Trump purged Democrat-appointed board members from the federally-funded Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in favor of loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” he wrote on social media. The move also comes amid evisceration of a key pillar of the country’s soft power, the U.S. Agency for International Development, by a high-profile task force that the billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk is steering.
USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, a think tank, has described AFS as a “unique cultural diplomacy initiative which screens provocative (and often critical of the U.S.) documentaries abroad.” AFS began in 2012, during Trump bête noire President Barack Obama’s first term, when the State Department was run by another of his nemeses, Secretary Hillary Clinton. The organization’s frequent focus on social justice topics would seem to put it at odds with the political and policy interests of the so-called “America First” right-wing movement now in power — although during the first Trump administration it tacked, in part, toward promoting can-do American entrepreneurism with projects like Blood, Sweat & Beer, about the start-up dynamism of the domestic craft-brewing market.
“This program is designed to be flexible to respond to and reflect an administration’s diplomatic and cultural priorities,” explains AFS director Rachel Gandin Mark, who’s run AFS since its inception. “The program does not reflect the political views of AFS staff.” She told IndieWire in 2015 that selected projects “often touch on important issues in contemporary American life including, but not limited to, women and girls’ empowerment, youth empowerment, civil society, diversity, disability rights, LGBT rights and the environment.” To this end, films often screen at U.S. embassies, such as Chasing Ice, about climate change, in Mongolia, or The Case Against 8, about LGBTQ+ rights, in Estonia. In her communications with The Hollywood Reporter, Gandin Mark emphasized the bipartisan nature of AFS-supported activities, noting that the objective is to “foster freedom of expression and strengthen creative economies worldwide.”
AFS envoys, who are sent abroad to conduct workshops and help host international delegations in L.A., have included a notably diverse array of entertainment industry veterans, including Oscar and Emmy honorees as well as professionals on projects like Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building and HBO’s House of the Dragon.
“Our programming is in service of America’s broad policy goals — including promoting freedom of speech and creative economies,” said Borella, the USC School of Cinematic Arts associate dean. “Our work is one of many outreach programs that aim to build friendly, peaceful relations between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, and professional exchanges.”
In 2018 AFS head Gandin Mark, who founded the Arab Film Festival in L.A. and served for years as a creative consultant for the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab in Jordan, launched another State Dept.-sponsored program, the Middle East Media Initiative, through USC with the goal of elevating the careers of Arabic TV writers. There is no change to the status of MEMI, according to USC.
AFS, whose federal grant is about $2 million per year, has been the successor to Cold War-era efforts which long promoted American values and countered global adversaries. The earlier endeavors mixed government-produced movies with strategic support of Hollywood studio projects. Some industry partners have remained a constant. Walt Disney assisted U.S. attempts to better relations with Latin America, known as the Good Neighbor policy, by releasing 1943’s Saludos Amigos and 1944’s The Three Caballeros. In 2023, Walt Disney Animation Studios partnered with the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta to discuss its first feature inspired by Southeast Asia, the Oscar-nominated Raya and the Last Dragon. (Indonesia is a key buffer against Chinese influence in the region.)
USC, whose film school perennially tops THR’s list of ranked programs and is considered the most prestigious in the country, has maintained a number of longstanding federal partnerships for research and other initiatives. These include collaborations 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 Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Feb. 12, 2 pm PST Updated throughout with additional reporting and commentary from Gandin Mark.
