The former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power will join cinema-goers for a post-film Q&A after a screening of the documentary The Final Year at the Light House Cinema this month.
The Final Year tracks the foreign policy team assembled by Barack Obama over the course of 2016, as his presidency comes to a close. The team travels the world attempting to solidify and “lock-in” policies that they believe will define their legacy, promote diplomacy over large-scale military action, and fundamentally alter how the US government confronts questions of war and peace. Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Deputy National Security Advisor and presidential confidant Ben Rhodes, as well National Security Advisor Susan Rice and President Obama himself tackle the unfolding crisis in Syria (and Russia’s role), visiting families during the Boko Haram kidnapping, the Iran nuclear deal, the resurgence of nationalism, and the results of the US election that challenge this legacy in unexpected and fundamental ways.
Director Greg Baker has spoken of the upheaval experienced by the film’s subjects, as they realised who they would be handing their work over to following the end of Obama’s tenure as president.
“It became a lot more important,” he said. “This cast of characters that we’d been tracking for a year, all their assumptions about what they had achieved and were leaving for the next administration were up for grabs. It became a kind of historic document of a monument in time that has passed.”
The Final Year will screen at the Light House on Saturday, 20th of January at 6.15pm and tickets are still available here. The film will mark an interesting marker for American politics, before the whole damn thing collapsed in on itself like a particularly ignorant and fascistic star…