In The Final Year, filmmaker Greg Barker followed President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team as it attempted to shape international policy in the last year of his presidency. But in just nine months since his inauguration, Donald Trump has tried to undo the work done by the Obama administration, for example, imposing new travel restrictions on Cuba and announcing plans to overturn the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
After the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, we spoke with Barker and two members of Obama’s foreign policy team—Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations, and Ben Rhodes, speechwriter and former assistant to the president—to discuss the feeling of having their successors reverse so much of their work in such a short period of time.