Cannes Film Festival 2021: Sean Penn rips apart Donald Trump post screening of his Flag Day

American actor director Sean Penn is a brilliant actor and an equally brilliant director. His sixth feature as a helmer in 30 years, Flag Day, played at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival's Competition the other day. But it was not so much the movie which though well received at Cannes, that brought Sean into the limelight, but his press conference which followed the screening. There the actor-director tore apart the former US President, Donald Trump.

Sean compared Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic to “someone with a machine gun gunning down communities that were most vulnerable from a turret at the White House".

“We were — not only as a country, but as a world – let down and openly neglected, misinformed,” he said of Trump. “We had truth and reason assaulted under what was in all terms an obscene administration. When my team and I would come home from test and vaccinations sites at night, particularly during testing under Trump, to maddening news — it felt like someone with a machine gun gunning down communities that were most vulnerable from a turret at the White House.”

“The administration of President Biden, by contrast, is like a sunrise”, Sean added. “In the transition to the task force that President Biden put together, it was really that feeling like a sun was rising. There was no effort of integrity coming from the federal government until the Trump administration was dismissed.”

Also read: Anushka Sharma, Virat Kohli celebrate Vamika's 6 months birthday with picnic in park; see pics

The virus, which is still ravaging the world, has infected 34 million people in the US, and killed at least 607,155, according to data from John Hopkins University.

Back to Flag Day, the movie narrates the touching and troubled relationship between a father (Sean) and his daughter (the actor's own, Dylan Penn). Based on Jennifer Vogel's 2004 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Lie, the adapted film is all about a girl growing up with a father who is sneaky, a compulsive liar and, above all, a petty thief. He is, forever, in debt and some of them whom he owes money are deadly guys.

(Written by Gautaman Bhaskaran)