With strongmen on the march, Jacinda Ardern's new film touts ‘empathetic leadership'

Los Angeles Times

26-01-2025

PARK CITY, Utah — Welcome to a special Sundance Daily edition of the Wide Shot, a newsletter about the business of entertainment. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Good morning! It's Sunday, Jan. 26, and today's forecast is for bright skies after a partly cloudy start, with a high of 27 degrees.
Saturday night brought the premiere of one of the festival's most buzzed-about documentaries, 'The Stringer,' which challenges the authorship of one of the most famous war photographs ever produced. And as staff writer Mark Olsen reports, it's not just the Associated Press, which recently concluded its own investigation into the origins of the image, that has a response to the film.
'It's quite upsetting to him personally and emotionally, as one could imagine,' James Hornstein, an attorney for Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Nick Ut, told The Times. 'This is perhaps the most important piece of work that he's done in his life in terms of the acclaim that this photo has brought. And for him to be accused of lying about it, which is what this film does, is devastating.'
More on the claims at the heart of 'The Stringer' at the link below, plus our interview with former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and recommendations for how to spend your day at the fest.
READ MORE: Inside a new documentary's provocative allegations about a famed Vietnam War photo
'Bunnylovr' (Redstone Cinemas, 9:30 p.m.)
The bunny in Katarina Zhu's debut is ridiculously cute, with eyes so big and black you could tumble into them and never hit bottom. Fittingly, its owner, a lonely twentysomething New York cam girl, spends the movie in free-fall. Rebecca (Zhu) exists to please others, including her selfish ex (Jack Kilmer) and absentee father (Perry Yung). She's a dutiful worker in today's charm economy, where making rent depends on making an online stranger (Austin Amelio) pay $500 to watch Rebecca hold her white rabbit while he unzips his pants. The lost woman's only act of rebellion is that she's late, she's late, for every important date. This year's Sundance is crowded with stories about digital disconnection (hey, maybe their filmmakers should meet up and make friends!) and this poised and darkly funny drama is so far nosing ahead of the pack. Rachel Sennott punches up this lightly autobiographical meta comedy as an artist painting her own off-kilter portrait of Rebecca. As Sennott boasts, 'It's giving deconstruction.' — Amy Nicholson
'Train Dreams' (Eccles Theatre, 9:30 p.m. Tuesday)
There is size to 'Train Dreams' — the construction of train tracks, the logging of vast forests, a cinematic sweep that says America is coming — that puts you in mind of 'There Will Be Blood' or 'The Brutalist.' But the film's real magic trick is that even swaddled in that grandeur, the story remains an intimate one, narrated by Will Patton. Credit should partly go to Joel Edgerton, quietly embodying the plot's taciturn central figure, Robert, a laborer who modestly toils and suffers and ends up leading an eventful life. Also let's recognize Denis Johnson's slender yet powerful 2011 novella, one of the author's high points. But ultimately, this is an achievement of pared-down drama-making by co-screenwriters Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar ('Sing Sing,' 'Jockey') who have a thing for second chances and structures that give actors room to breathe. — Joshua Rothkopf
As documentaries go, 'Prime Minister' didn't follow the usual route. Then again, neither has its subject.
After all, the film's portrait of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who came to power in 2017, weathered a devastating mass shooting and the COVID-19 crisis, then stepped down in 2023, comes in large part from Ardern herself. This treasure trove of candid interviews, recorded during her tenure as part of an oral history project at the Alexander Turnbull library, and intimate home video footage, filmed by her broadcaster partner Clarke Gayford, left directors Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz with a rich vein of source material — and a 17-hour rough cut.
Trimmed down to feature length, the result, which premiered at Sundance in the world documentary competition, is an uncommonly revealing portrait of leadership in action, with Ardern opening up about her struggle to breastfeed daughter Neve; passing major gun control legislation; and feeling unmoored by contentious anti-vax protests, among other subjects.
Ardern, joined by the filmmakers, stopped by the L.A. Times Studios in Park City on Saturday, where she discussed her style of 'empathetic leadership,' the intensity of higher office and why singular figures like President Trump shouldn't be the focus of our politics. The following is an excerpt from that conversation; watch the full video here. — Matt Brennan
You describe yourself in the film as a 'reluctant prime minister.' And we see the taxing nature of the job, specifically in the period that you had the job. What made you want to do something that would put you back in the spotlight? I imagine there must have been some trepidation about it as much as excitement.
I always viewed the role of being prime minister as both a privilege, but also a responsibility. And I care a lot about public leadership and I care a lot about putting out into the world that there are alternative leadership styles like empathetic leadership. So after I left office and saw that people started talking a little bit about how empathetic leadership felt unusual to them and they hadn't seen much of it, I wondered whether or not I could play some small part in just re-humanizing leadership and demonstrating that you can be an empathetic leader and you can also do a job successfully.
I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the specifics. One is that, in the aftermath of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, you led New Zealand to pass new gun restrictions. In the United States, we have what often seems like an intractable gun control debate and gun violence problem. Based on your experience, would you have any advice for legislators in the U.S. or other countries that have gun violence issues about how to move the ball forward on something that often feels like it's never going to change?
I do get asked this question a little bit and I'm very mindful that I can only speak to the New Zealand experience because, you know, that's my home. I understand the history and culture and the context of New Zealand in a way that I never will of any other country. But speaking to that experience, all I know is that in the aftermath of March 15, I felt the public expectation for us to act on what had happened and to do everything we could to prevent it from happening again. And so you saw in the film, [there are] 120 members of Parliament and 119 of them voted in favor for change. And I think that was a reflection of the people we were serving. It was a reflection of where New Zealanders were.
I was struck that, when you resigned, you described it as having 'outstayed your welcome.' Or you sort of feared that you had outstayed your welcome. I'm wondering if you think that there is still a possibility of a longer-serving democratic leader, someone like Richard Seddon in the New Zealand context, or FDR or Margaret Thatcher, in an era of the kind of level of scrutiny that you get from social media that we see during the Parliament protests.
Just to put the resignation in that wider context, I was thinking about a whole range of issues and one of them was just anticipating the progress that had been made and how to retain that. But the primary [reason] was ultimately whether I had enough to keep doing the job well. I wouldn't describe it as burnout. I described it as having enough in the tank. And I'd known that after five years... You just don't know what's going to come your way. You need to have those reserves, particularly if you do want to lead with care, curiosity and without being defensive. And so all of that weighed on my mind. But you're right to ask that question. Will we as a society [have] those longer periods of leadership when there is such an intensity to leadership now. I don't know whether or not it would be fair to call it additional scrutiny, but certainly from the outside it appears that it may be that way. And that comes back again to my hope in being so open about leadership. With that extra scrutiny, I hope we don't lose sight of the fact that there are still humans doing these jobs in public life. And maybe we need to to just remind ourselves of that — not just for politicians, but people in leadership or who are decision-makers open for scrutiny. I don't know if that means people will last for longer, but I do hope it means that good people still put themselves forward.
At this moment of sort of rejection of parties in power and the rise of authoritarianism around the globe and right-wing parties, what do you think is the way forward for progressive and empathetic parties and leadership right now that can also be electorally effective?
Perhaps we run the risk of assuming that the things that we're seeking from political leaders are different from the things that we seek from one another. I happen to be in the camp of people that thinks that the values that we value as communities should be the values that we that we seek out in leadership. And so I've always had a very simple mantra: Why should what we teach our children be any different than what we expect from our leaders? And we teach our kids kindness and generosity and bravery and curiosity. So I hope that we don't lose our expectation that we see that in leadership as well, including political leadership.
The film contains a scene at a U.N. General Assembly meeting in 2018 where you're asked by the press whether you find Donald Trump likable and you give what I would describe as a very diplomatic answer. Now that you're out of office, would you describe Donald Trump as likable? Would you answer it differently now than you had to when you had to meet with him as heads of state?
I wouldn't answer differently. We run the risk of focusing in on individual personalities. And actually we need to ask ourselves what's going on in people's lives and how that's manifesting in democracies around the world. I don't think we should define leadership by singular individuals. We should define leadership by the values that we'd like to see in our communities and in one another. So I think I feel the same way now as I did then.
As usual, this year's Sundance selection is chock-full of timely documentaries — about trans rights, prison conditions, the fate of left-leaning politicians and more. But only one is evolving so rapidly, so recently, that it could conceivably change its title.
From filmmakers Jesse Short Bull ('Lakota Nation vs. the United States') and David France ('How to Survive a Plague'), 'Free Leonard Peltier' chronicles the effort to secure the release of the Native American activist, who was sentenced to life in prison for the killing of two FBI agents in a 1975 standoff at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Just days before the start of the festival, in one of his final acts at president, Joe Biden commuted Peltier's sentence, the culmination of decades of work by activists who claim the American Indian Movement figure was wrongfully convicted.
Ahead of the film's world premiere on Monday (3:15 p.m. at the Ray Theatre, 1768 Park Ave.), the directors and producers Bird Runningwater and Jhane Meyers will discuss the road to this moment and what recent developments in Peltier's status mean for the movement. They may not change the title to 'Leonard Peltier, Freed,' but it promises to be one of the most urgent conversations at Sundance this year.
The Box at the Ray, 1768 Park Ave., 11:30 a.m.
Most actors who stop by the L.A. Times Studios to get their photos taken are delighted to see the frames of them and their cast mates on monitors we have set up, but one star was more interested in photos on his phone. Tony Danza, who is at Sundance to support 'Power Book III: Raising Kanan,' showed off pictures of his first granddaughter (and third grandchild), who was born Friday night. She's already ready for the spotlight — a favorite snap was one of the newborn posing. Catch up and see photos of the stars who dropped by on Saturday, including Carey Mulligan and Benedict Cumberbatch, and check out clips from our video interviews below. — Vanessa Franko
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