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Jacinda Ardern Documentary ‘Prime Minister' Shows Us How the New Zealand Leader Is the Anti-Trump
On June 10 at a packed auditorium in Marina Del Rey, California, the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern (2017-2023) comforted a room full of anxious Americans by showing them what empathetic leadership looks like. She was answering questions from Rachel Bloom at Live Talks Los Angeles about her new memoir 'A Different Kind of Power.' She is also the subject of the Sundance World Cinema audience-award-winning documentary 'Prime Minister' (CNN/HBO), which Magnolia opens in theaters June 13.
'Over the course of my time in office,' Ardern told the rapt audience, 'we had a domestic terror attack that took the lives of 51 members of our Muslim community. We had a pandemic, we had a volcanic eruption, we had a series of natural disasters. I saw and experienced a lot of difficult moments, and in all of them, I can give you examples of incredible kindness and humanity and generosity. I still fundamentally believe [that is] our natural inclination. We currently have a disconnect where that is not what is on display by political leadership. Because instead, politics has decided that blame and the weaponization of fear is a better response to the difficult period we're in, than the much more challenging response in politics, which is to actually solve the problems that people are facing.'
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Ardern's story is remarkable. She reluctantly ran for Prime Minister in 2017 after the Labour candidate dipped in the polls, and her party eventually, after intense negotiations with smaller parties, squeaked to a win. Three days before the results were announced, Ardern found out that she was pregnant. She took office in October 2017 at age 37, the youngest in New Zealand's history, the youngest country leader at that time in the world, and the third woman to serve as New Zealand Prime Minister. In due time, she gave birth to a daughter, only the second elected world leader to do so (after Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto).
From the start, Ardern made it clear that her partner, Clark Gayford, would be the primary caregiver for their child. A former TV anchorman, Gayford was not only used to being in the spotlight but knew how to wield a video camera. He filmed their life behind the scenes from 2017 through her decision to step down five years later, after her popularity waned. 'The only thing that I ever found overrode self-doubt was my grinding sense of responsibility,' said Ardern. 'I knew that I had to answer the call. And so from then on, I just had to get on with it. So that was what did it.'
That intimate footage was key to assembling 'Prime Minister,' which could have become a local production. But when producer Gigi Pritzker came on board, she brought in ace editor Lindsay Utz (Oscar-winner 'American Factory,' 'Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry,' 'Martha') to make a film with global appeal that was bigger than a New Zealand political story. Making her feature debut, Utz co-directed with New Zealand's Michelle Walsh.
The film was seven years in the making. 'Everybody that was working on it in New Zealand recognized that it was a powerful moment in time and it should be documented,' Utz told me. 'But there was never any plan until Jacinda resigned and came to the States.'
When the New Zealand team came to America to finance the movie, American financier Pritzker showed Utz some video. 'I only had to look at about two minutes to know that I wanted to take on the project,' said Utz. 'At the time, I looked at the breastfeeding footage. I had just had my second baby, and I was struggling with similar issues, common issues that women struggle with. And so this film became two countries and two teams coming together.'
The Rt. Honorable Dame Ardern now serves as a fellow at Harvard University. When Utz got started, Ardern had moved to the East Coast, so the director was able to meet and bond with her in Boston. She and Walsh interviewed Ardern together and also got access to New Zealand's oral history project and 40 hours of audio diaries that had been recorded when Ardern was in office. 'That's a gift right from the documentary heavens,' said Utz, whose editorial background was an asset as the film melded together archive and fresh interviews. The first rough cut assemblage ran 17 hours. The editing team took a year to wrestle the movie down to one hour and 42 minutes.
The directors wanted Ardern's voice 'to be at the center of the film,' said Utz, 'almost as if you're sitting next to her and she's telling you a story. The approach was using the audio diaries as a portal into the past and then doing these incredibly intimate interviews with her. And we were lucky, because she was writing her memoir at the time, so she was in this contemplative space. And you can see that in the interviews, they're pretty raw. She's pretty raw. She's still processing what she's just been through. We wanted it to feel like reflection, and intimate, but we were always aware that we wanted the past to be propulsive and move forward in a verité way. So we had to balance the past and the present.'
Front and center was Ardern's model of a different kind of governing. 'She showed up unapologetically as herself,' said Utz. 'And that's what people take note of. They feel the authenticity, and they feel the conviction. And she demonstrates that you can be both empathetic and strong, that you can be kind and have resolve. It was important to us to show the portrait of the leader that we saw.'
Remarkably, Ardern gave the filmmakers leeway. 'She did not have control,' said Utz. 'She was a good subject. You can imagine it's hard for Clark, because he shot a lot of this footage, to let go. We were given space to work and figure out how to craft this movie, and she didn't see it cut until after we submitted to Sundance.'
The filmmakers screened 'Prime Minister' for Ardern in New York. 'Michelle and I were sitting in the room squeezing each other, sitting a few aisles behind her,' said Utz. 'She's watching it for the first time, and that's always a nerve-wracking experience. A lot of it is hard for her to watch, but because she is such a lover of history and documentation, she understood that even the stuff that she is embarrassed by is all part of the story. And she gave us great freedom to do what we thought was right.'
As you watch the documentary, it's striking how different New Zealand is from the United States, where it's hard to imagine many of the accomplishments of Ardern's administration even being possible, from shutting down the entire country during COVID, saving 20,000 people's lives, to ordering her citizens to turn in their arms. After the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019, the government implemented strict gun control reforms. Within weeks, Parliament passed a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons, nearly unanimously. The months-long government buyback program, by the end of 2019, collected over 56,000 banned firearms and almost 200,000 illegal gun parts. 'It's surreal to watch this,' said Utz, 'because it feels like another planet.'
The parliamentary system in New Zealand also favors the election of women in Parliament. Still, Ardern is something of a unicorn in today's tumultuous right-leaning times. 'You see the political will behind the scenes,' said Utz. 'And you see the passion, and you feel her commitment to these issues. We didn't want to make a film that was dissecting all of her policies. We wanted this to be an intimate, personal journey of a woman on the world stage, facing all sorts of things that women face: the balance of work and motherhood, what it looks like to have a supportive partner. This was a family story, too. You were invested in them as a family, because they were a unit, that's how she functioned, that's how she did her job.'
Another aspect of the Ardern story: New Zealand has always been a progressive country. But that did not protect her when the wolves began to circle. Her popularity soared and then fell after months of organized protests. 'Russian cells were pumping disinformation into New Zealand,' said Utz. 'The New Zealand public was interacting with that disinformation at a much higher rate than other countries at that time. There was the anti-vaccine sentiment, of course, that we saw in lots of places in the world, that became a powerful force. And Quanon and our American politics were being looked at and studied and admired.'
When the economy tanked after COVID, Ardern was under tremendous pressure, and decided to resign before the end of her term. 'A lot of people have anger towards her, still to this day, about her policies,' said Utz, '[saying] they were too draconian, too strict, put too much emphasis on life and not enough on the economy, although [Ardern's government] did do a lot to support families and people during the pandemic. You could find people on both sides of that issue.'
As the movie hits theaters, Utz is 'secretly thrilled that we got a film about a progressive politician into theaters nationwide,' she said. 'It feels like something unique right now. People are desperate for some light and some inspiration. And she's good at that.'
Where Ardern goes, applause follows. 'We could not move anywhere in Park City without being stopped by somebody in the streets,' said Utz. 'Since then, it's been playing at festivals, and we're getting the same reaction everywhere. There's palpable emotion in the room. We opened Sundance Mexico City last week. It's hitting a nerve, it's touching something inside.'
At her Live Talks Los Angeles event, Ardern held the audience in her hand. She knows where the laughs and groans are and that she represents the polar opposite of Donald Trump. She's everything that our current administration is not. And she offers hope for what an alternative could look like.
She told a story about the early days of her experience in Parliament. After a particularly grueling round of debate one day, Ardern went to one of the tougher politicians and asked how she should toughen up. He said: 'Just a minute, don't toughen up. If you toughen up, you will lose your empathy, and that is what's going to make you good at your job.'
That was the moment, Ardern said, 'that I decided that actually thin-skin sensitivity, it's all empathy. And he was right, if I lost it, I lost something else. So that was just going to have to be the price I was going to pay. Politics was going to feel hard, but maybe it was meant to feel hard.'
From there, Ardern learned to ignore comments, to filter, to avoid reviews. 'I would decide when I engaged on social media and when I didn't,' said Ardern. 'And when I was Prime Minister, I knew the media, and it was a saving grace, because it meant I dealt with the issue of the day, not the commentary on the issue of the day, and it meant that I was always facing forward, rather than trying to correct something that had happened in the past.'
She also took control of her schedule. 'I was in a role where it was assumed that you couldn't,' said Ardern. And she focused on finding quality time for her child. 'The thing I found the hardest was I might be physically there, but I wasn't always mentally there. And so if I'm going to be home for that time, I need to make bath time count. I thought about the memories I wanted to have of that time, and I didn't want her to see a stressed mom.'
At the end of 'Prime Minister,' Ardern and Gaylord get married. 'It's always a good thing,' said Utz. 'Can you have a wedding? Use it.'
'Prime Minister' opens from Magnolia Pictures on Friday, June 13.
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