This became the highest-grossing documentary in US history when released in 2012, and snowballed to have such an effect on American public opinion that its maker the Conservative author and academic Dinesh D’Souza was actually jailed on dubious charges two years later.
D’Souza’s films are party political broadcasts, diatribes really. He is unashamedly promoting the Conservative and also the Republican point of view. At times these have been at odds but in our day, on the subject of Obama and the Democrats, they are in harmony. Hence the gleefully partisan nature of his films. Big-budget, somewhat over-the-top and occasionally cringeworthily unselfconscious.
This one is an artistically edited, slow-building crescendo of meticulous deconstruction that unpacks the conventional Obama narrative and argues that in fact he represents a radical anti-colonial and Marxist/ Islamic movement that cleverly exploited American aspirations for racial reconciliation in order to reach the White House. Whatever you think of this view or of D’Souza’s polemical style, it is a powerful and thought-provoking documentary whose impact is hard to dismiss and whose predictions largely came true.
Only US Politics 