Airports across the country were jammed with protesters expressing outrage at Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration ban on Sunday. Meanwhile, he was busy with hosting his first big movie event at The White House – a screening of Pixar’s animated blockbuster Finding Dory, a film about families reuniting voiced by the world’s most famous lesbian, Ellen DeGeneres.
Theatrically released films have been made available to presidents reaching back to the dawn of the moving image when Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s 1915 love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation, according to The Hollywood Reporter
While the original The Birth of a Nation would not be out of place in Trump’s White House, the current administration had put out requests for Finding Dory and the raunchy comedy Why Him? starring Bryan Cranston and James Franco, THR reports.
While the leader of the free world (for now) was cozying up to an animated children’s flick in the White House family theater, according to his press schedule, protesters continued to swarm airports in response Trump’s executive order banning entry to the United States by people from seven different predominantly Muslim nations.
Finding Dory, the long-awaited sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo, was released this year and became an instant blockbuster. In the film, Dory (voiced by Ellen), travels the world in search of her parents (an ironic choice of a plot from a man whose Muslim ban has the ability to ostensibly separate countless families).
Not one to shy away from difficult, important political topics despite the light nature of her talk show, Ellen Tweeted at the White House about the ban upon learning of the screening, according to THR. And, as usual, she got her message across in a way that is both light and deadly serious.
