Barry

BARRY is based on one year in Barack Obama’s young life. On his way to becoming the 44th US president, “Barry” Obama (Devon Terrell) was almost a typical college kid. He drank; he smoked incessantly; he swore; he fell in love. He pondered his place in the world, his relationship to his family, his emerging principles. But unlike most, everything was complicated by his multiracial identity and the unusual journey he’d taken from Hawaii to Indonesia to Los Angeles over his early years. From his first moments on the Columbia University campus at age 19, after an unpleasant encounter with a campus police officer, Barry encounters the fast-paced, diverse, sometimes hard-edges of New York City and the people who live there. As he becomes a part of the community (in pickup basketball games, at Columbia, and on the neighborhood Harlem streets) he meets, among others, a savvy graduate student (Jason Mitchell, who makes a strong impression), Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy), a strikingly wise and a liberal female classmate, and reconstitutes a friendship with an old acquaintance (Avi Nash). These experiences and relationships, together with a growing sense of his own priorities and his struggles to come to terms with an absent father and unconventional mother, are shown to significantly contribute to the maturation of the man who would be elected President of the United States in 2008.