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Old January 4th, 2017 #1
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Post A Jew and an Indian make a film - about the African American experience

SAN FRANCISCO — The new hit Netflix biopic, “Barry,” about a young Barack Obama includes a few good pejoratives from the author of the international bestseller, “Go the F**k to Sleep.”

The hit “not for children” children’s book shares a few speech patterns that author Adam Mansbach introduced into the first screenplay. For him and director Vikram Gandhi, the biopic is not only an immersive look at the outgoing president’s university experience — it is also a chance to introduce relevant issues to the national spotlight.

“We all had a sense that this was a way to smuggle a movie that dealt with race and identity into the cultural conversation because we know this guy was the future president of the free world,” Mansbach tells The Times of Israel.

“The movie being about Obama allows it to get made, get funded, get the attention it has gotten… Our goal going in was to make a movie that would still work were it not about Obama, to make sense, be resonant, be powerful, be interesting, even if it were about someone named Greg,” he says.

Mansbach, who is Jewish, and Gandhi, who is Indian, met while students at Columbia University, where the film is set. Mansbach now lives in Berkeley, California, where he received a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theatre Writing Fellowship for “Go the F**k to Sleep.” He says the film helps shine a spotlight on a number of relevant issues.

At one point on screen, an older African-American man asks a young Obama about his identity. When Obama explains his mother is from Kansas and his father is from Kenya, his interlocutor replies to his Honolulu-Jakarta-California trajectory with a telling answer. “You know what that makes you?” he asks. “It makes you American.”

As Obama explores both the Ivy League and Harlem, the movie raises questions of race, identity, poverty, privilege and other issues taking on growing significance with the impending inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump. In his search for acceptance and diversity, the film speaks to growing concerns facing America today.

“The reason Vikram wanted to make the movie and I wanted to make the movie is we empathized with Barry’s experiences,” Mansbach explains. “We both understood in reading the few pages he wrote about it, the kind of alienation he felt showing up to that campus.”

The film combines both biographical elements of Obama’s life with fictional ones.

“There is a lot that is imagined and invented,” Mansbach says. “The reason we chose this time is because it’s a relatively opaque one in Obama’s life. There are not a lot of hard facts. He wrote a bit about it in [his published memoir] “Dreams From My Father,” but it’s only a few pages. By and large, it was opaque enough. It allowed me to improvise quite freely without it conflicting with anything on the record.”

In the film, 20-year-old Obama (Devon Terrell) begins his junior year as a transfer student to Columbia University. He experiences tensions between his white privileg

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read full article at source: http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-jew-a...an-experience/
 
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