“Love him, hate him — you don’t know him,” reads the tagline for the upcoming documentary, “Obama’s America: 2016.”
The film follows conservative author and speaker Dinesh D’Souza’s journey attempt to piece together President Barack Obama’s past, how his ideology developed and, should he be re-elected, what his America will look like in 2016.
“[The film] is not a crude bashing of Obama. … It’s a journey to find the real Obama. Obama [has been] a mystery figure for the past four years – mystery as to what his underlining goal is for America and for the world,” D’Souza said in an interview with The Daily Caller.
The film is based on both his best-selling 2010 book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” and the upcoming “Obama’s America.” It features the author’s travels to Hawaii, Indonesia and Kenya.
“The film is an attempt to show Obama’s world…through conversations with people who knew Obama in the landscape that Obama was shaped by,” D’Souza said. “So there are two journeys in the film: my journey to find out who Obama is, and Obama’s journey to find out who he is.”
One portion of the film, D’Souza said, reinforces the thesis he laid out in “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” — that Obama’s worldview is shaped by his Kenyan father’s anti-colonialist anger towards the West and its dominance.
In his travels, D’Souza interviews many figures from the president’s past, including his half-brother, George Obama, who lives in a shack in Nairobi, Kenya that D’Souza likens to “something out of ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’”
In a clip from the film, D’Souza presses George on a number of topics, including why he lives in a slum without any support from his powerful, wealthy brother.
“The irony of Obama isn’t just that he is a multimillionaire, and here is his half brother living in a hut. What is a shock about Obama is he is out there lecturing everyone about what we owe others unrelated to us,” D’Souza told TheDC.
But in the clip, George brushes off the notion that his brother should provide for him.
“I think he has a family of his own,” George Obama says. “I’m a member of his family, but I’m over-age, so I help myself. … He’s got other issues to deal with. He’s taking care of the world, so he’s taking care of me.”
D’Souza told TheDC that he thinks the president distances himself from his half-brother is because he is the “black sheep” of the family as a result of not sharing his brother or biological father’s anti-colonialist views.
In the clip, George tells D’Souza that Kenya might be better off if the “white man” had stayed around longer, and that the country might be more industrialized like South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore.
D’Souza also traveled to Hawaii and Indonesia, where he said he learned much more about the president’s mother, and discovered that she was a much more powerful figure than Obama has let on his books.
The film and the upcoming book are both deliberately timed for release just months before the presidential election, a tactic that D’Souza took from an unlikely source: liberal filmmaker Michael Moore.
“Back in 2004, Michael Moore made a provocative film cleverly made, captivating film and dropped it in the middle of the election debate. I said as far as I can see, no one has done that to Obama,” D’Souza said.
D’Souza said that he hopes audiences, whether liberal or conservative, come out of the theater having learned something new about the man who could be the president for the next four years.
“There is no better time to have this conversation,” D’Souza said.
“Obama’s America: 2016” will debut July 27 in Houston, followed by a limited national release. The book, “Obama’s America,” will hit shelves in mid-August.
Watch a clip from “Obama’s America: 2016”: