Editor's Review

HBO’s Barack Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union chronicles the personal and political journey of President Barack Obama as America grapples with its racial history.

Barack Obama Documentary: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union now Streaming on Showmax 

HBO’s Barack Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union chronicles the personal and political journey of President Barack Obama as America grapples with its racial history.

Directed by seven-time Emmy winner Peter Kunhardt and executive produced by The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb, the three-part docuseries has a 91% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with RogerEbert.com calling it “a comprehensive and compelling analysis… Kunhardt’s film brightly illuminates how essential the discussion of Obama’s handling of race is to American culture as a whole, especially when it was no accident that every president before him was a white man.”

Timed to coincide with the former president’s 60th birthday, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union features the likes of politician Jesse Jackson, professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, political consultant David Axelrod, authors Michael Eric Dyson and Ta-Nehisi Coates, reverends Alvin Love and Jeremiah Wright, New Yorker editor David Remnick, speechwriter Jon Favreau and journalists Laura Washington and Michele Norris.

Interspersed with his own speeches and news interviews, the series begins with Obama’s childhood and takes us through his perspective as the son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father, his spiritual formation by a generation of Black leaders, and his hopes for a more inclusive America.

But, as Los Angeles Times, says, “HBO’s new documentary goes places the Obama media machine might not have... It ultimately sets itself apart by taking a deeper look at the multitude of issues that surfaced after America finally chose its first Black president.”