Barack Obama

Everything on this page is Barack Obama appearing as himself. He was the 44th president of the United States, in office from 2009 to 2017, the first African American to hold the job, a Democratic senator for Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and a state senator before that. The screen credits are a byproduct of that, not a second career, and reading them as a filmography produces something more interesting than a filmography.

Most of the entries are archive footage, which means the list works as a map of what documentary makers were arguing about for two decades. Surveillance and the security state: Citizenfour, Zero Days, Terms and Conditions May Apply. Incarceration and race: 13th, The House I Live In. Climate: Before the Flood, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Money: Capitalism: A Love Story, Inequality for All, Dirty Money. Filmmakers on opposite sides of every one of those arguments cut the same podium footage to opposite conclusions, which is the honest lesson of the archive.

The deliberate appearances are a smaller and stranger set. He sat for Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Running Wild with Bear Grylls and My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, and turned up in sports documentaries including The Last Dance and They Call Me Magic. He has won a Primetime Emmy for narration and two Grammy Awards for spoken word recordings, which is the part of this list where he is actually working rather than being quoted.