Doc looks back wistfully at Obama-era diplomacy

Greg Barker had assembled nearly all his footage for “The Final Year,’’ a behind-thescenes look at President Barack Obama’s globe-trotting foreign policy team, when something unexpected happened — so unexpected that it left its main characters literally speechless.

Donald Trump was elected president.

The development not only shocked those onscreen, but changed the trajectory of the film rather dramatically (not to mention the country and the world, but we’re talking about the film here.)

Suddenly, a documentary that would have been interesting mainly to diplomacy wonks and foreign news junkies became one that will, to many Trump opponents — the film’s likely audience — be both a painful trip down memory lane and a frightening reminder of how tenuous diplomatic deals can be, once the regime changes at home.

As a record of initiatives that were more or less stopped in their tracks, it may have become much more of a highprofile film — a reality that one of its main subjects, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, acknowledged at a recent screening. (She added that she’d trade that in an instant for a different election result.)

Power, a former journalist, was one of three main diplomats that Barker followed around the world as they sought to solidify the administration’s legacy — on issues such as the Iran nuclear deal, relations with Cuba, the situation in Syria, climate change and more — as the hourglass was emptying in 2016.