The film summary above does not do justice to the film; it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year and also a Golden Globe and an Oscar for best foreign-langauge film a year later.

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In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, former US President Barak Obama wrote: '"One evening, while thumbing through the Village Voice, my mother's eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie, Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted we go see it that night; she said it was the first foreign film she had ever seen ... "I was only sixteen then", she told us as we entered the elevator: "I'd just been accepted to the University of Chicago – Gramps hadn't yet told me I couldn't go – and I was there for the summer, working as an au pair. It was the first time I'd ever been really on my own. Gosh, I felt like such an adult. And when I saw this film, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.'"

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Sixteen year old Barak reacted to the film differently. His comments have been quoted elsewhere, sometimes out of context. The usual part quoted goes like this: "About halfway through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different. I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me ....."

Writing in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw challenges Barak Obama's view of Black Orpheus: 'For what it's worth, I think Obama is wrong about Black Orpheus – he's too tough on it. And yet for me this passage exposed, more dramatically than anything has in a very long while, the fact that critical perceptions are governed by class, by background and by race.

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Nevertheless, that is the impression the film made on the young Barak. Interestingly, musicals generally, particularly many musicals of the 1950s and before, have characters and plots that could be described as 'childlike', or at least 'naive' in the sense of 'natural and unaffected; innocent'. I am not sure that for all of them, 'critical perceptions are governed by class, by background and by race', but perhaps they are?

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In many ways, Orfeo Negro has far more 'darker' characters and scenes than many. Perhaps Barak should not have left half way through!