Obama documentary ‘The Final Year’ offers an urgent ideological rebuttal to Trump's presidency

Greg Barker had his film, The Final Year, released at the Toronto Film Festival this month. It was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times:

When Greg Barker began shooting his documentary about the Obama foreign policy team in early 2016, he had the expected thought: this would serve as a nice elegy to an outgoing administration.

Then the unexpected happened.

“There was going to be this friendly handoff of power, and then we’d see more of the accomplishments solidified,” Barker said of his initial intentions for the movie, titled “The Final Year.” “And of course there was an X-factor they didn’t see coming.”

That Trumpian curveball changed the last few months of filming, which continued until the inauguration. And it makes the final product a fundamentally different beast. What had been a straightforward D.C. document, color-drenched but benign, becomes an urgent ideological rebuttal when viewed through the lens of 2017.