The film-maker Bill Forsyth has claimed that people living next to Donald Trump's golf course have suffered from "malign, egotistical bullying" and "craven" political behaviour comparable to living in communist-era
In
an article for the Guardian Forsyth
said there were striking parallels between the experiences of Trump's
neighbours in Aberdeenshire and the fictional disputes in his cult classic
Local Hero involving a US billionaire who wants to buy a remote Scottish beach
and village.
The director, who won a Bafta for Local Hero
in 1983, said that a highly critical documentary on the Trump golf course
called You've Been Trumped, which will be broadcast on UK television for the
first time this Sunday, had left him "dazed and shocked".
Forsyth, right, said: "We're watching
real lives and livelihoods mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of
egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by
national politicians and crass misreading of events by local authorities
including police."
The documentary, which recorded Trump's
neighbours losing their water supply, having vast earth walls built outside their
homes and the film-makers arrested, was "a moving depiction of human
survival and dignity amidst murky doings akin to seventies Romania."
Many cited Local Hero
after one of Trump's most stubborn neighbours, Michael Forbes, resisted the
property developer's repeated efforts to buy and demolish his home to expand
the golf resort. Trump
said Forbes's home was a "pigsty" and a "slum" and called
Forbes "dirty" and "a loser".
In 2010, Lord Puttnam, who produced Local Hero
with Forsyth, emerged as one of 60 protesters against the course who had bought
small parcels of land from Forbes to thwart attempts to compulsorily purchase
Forbes's home.
Forsyth writes that Trump emerged from the
documentary as an unsophisticated, shallow "Johnny One Note" whose
character "would have very limited utility in a sophisticated fictional
drama. That's not to deny his usefulness elsewhere, say in a comparatively primitive
or cheap drama."
Trump reacted to news that the documentary was
being shown on BBC2 by launching a tirade on Twitter against its director,
Anthony Baxter, and other "morons" who criticised his now mothballed
£750m resort, which was to be built at the course.
Trump stated:
"All the morons that cause the controversy in Scotlandhave made my
development far more successful than anticipated."
He then added that the film, which has now
been screened in US cinemas and was acclaimed by the radical filmmaker Michael
Moore, had helped him "promote & make Trump International Golf Links
Scotland so successful you stupid fool!" In another tweet, he told Baxter:
"Your documentary has died many deaths. You have, in my opinion, zero
talent."
The documentary's broadcast on Sunday night is
an awkward piece of timing for the first minister Alex Salmond, once an
influential supporter of Trump's £750m plan for a major golf resort in his
Aberdeenshire constituency.
The Scottish National party wraps up its
annual conference in Perth
It emerged last week the first minister had
written privately to Trump seeking his public support for the controversial
decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie
bombing. Trump refused.
The pair have since
fallen out publicly over Trump's repeated attacks on a government-backed offshore
windfarm test site planned near his estate north of Aberdeen. Those
intensified on Tuesday after Trump's lawyers threatened again to sue Scottish
agencies supporting the windfarm proposal.
Trump's executive vice president and counsel,
George Sorial, would not comment directly on Forsyth's remarks but said
Baxter's film was "a gross misrepresentation of the facts."
Sorial said the project was widely supported
by local people, business leaders and local politicians.
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