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 worried Americans by showing them what empathic leadership looks like. She answered questions from Rachel Bloom on Live Talks Los Angeles about her new memoir “Another type of power.” She is also the subject of the Sundance World Cinema Public-Prize-winning documentary “Prime Minister” (CNN/HBO), which Magnolia opens in the theaters on June 13.
“During my time in the office,” said Ardern to the RAPT audience, “we had a domestic terrorist attack that took the life of 51 members of our Muslim community. We had a pandemic, we had a volcanic outbreak, we had a series of natural disasters. I saw and experienced many difficult moments, and in all of them, I can give you the institutions I can give you
Arder’s story is remarkable. She reluctantly ran for Prime Minister 2017 after the work candidate dipped in the election meetings, and her party eventually, after intense negotiations with smaller parties, screamed for a victory. Three days before the results were announced, the Arder got that she was pregnant. She took office in October 2017 at the age of 37, the youngest in New Zealand’s history, the youngest country leader at that time in the world and the third woman who served as New Zealand’s prime minister. At a time, she gave birth to a daughter, just the other elected world leader who did it (after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto).
From the beginning, the Arder made it clear that her partner, Clark Gayford, would be the foremost caregiver for her child. Gayford, a former TV anchor, was not only used to being in the limelight but knew how to practice a camcorder. He filmed their lives behind the scenes from 2017 through her decision to resign five years later, after her popularity decreased. “The only thing I have ever found exceeded self -doubt was my grinding sense of responsibility,” Ardern said. “I knew I had to answer the call. And then I had to continue with it. So that was what it did.”
These intimate pictures were the key to gathering “Prime Minister”, which could have become a local production. But when producer Gigi Pritzker came on board, she brought in Ess editor Lindsay Utz (Oscar winner “American Factory”, “Billie Eilish: The world is a bit blurry”, “Martha”) to make a one one film with global appeal that was larger than a New Zealand political story. Doit her feature debut, UTZ with directed with New Zealand’s Michelle Walsh.
The film was seven years on the way. “Everyone who worked with it in New Zealand realized 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 New Zealand’s team came to America to finance the film, American financier Pritzker UTZ showed any video. “I just had to look at about two minutes to know I wanted to put on the project,” Utz said. “At that time I looked at the breastfeeding pictures. I had just had my second child, and I struggled with similar questions, common questions that women struggle with. And then this movie became two countries and two teams that met.”
RT. Honest Dame Arder now serves as a fellow at Harvard University. When Utz got started, the Arder had moved to the east coast, so the director could meet and bind with her in Boston. She and Walsh interviewed the Arder together and also gained access to New Zealand’s oral historical projects and 40 hours of audio diaries that had been recorded when the Arder was on duty. “It’s a gift directly from the documentary’s sky,” said UTZ, whose editorial background was an asset when the film merged the archive and fresh Interviews. The first rough average assembly went 17 hours. The editing team took a year to wrestle the film down to an hour and 42 minutes.
The directors wanted the Arder’s voice “to be in the middle of the movie”, said Utz, “almost as if you are sitting next to her and she tells a story. The approach used the audio diaries as a portal in the past and then did these incredibly intimate interviews with her. And we were lucky, because she wrote her memoir at that time, so she was in this time, so she was gone through.
The front and center was the Arder’s model of another type of control. “She turned out to be unapologetically like herself,” Utz said. “And that’s what people note. They feel authenticity and they feel the conviction. And she shows that you can be both empathic and strong, that you can be kind and have decided. It was important for us to show the portrait of the leader we saw.”
It is remarkable that the Arder gave the filmmakers’ room. “She had no control,” Utz said. “She was a good topic. You can imagine it is difficult for Clark, because he shot a lot of these pictures, to let go. We were given space to work and find out how to create this movie, and she did not see it cut until after we sent to Sundance.”
The filmmakers showed “Prime Minister” for the Arder in New York. “Michelle and I sat in the room pushing each other and sat behind her a few times,” Utz said. “She looks at it for the first time, and it is always a nervous experience. Much of it is difficult for her to look at, but since she is such a lover of history and documentation, she realized that even the things she is embarrassed by is all part of the story. And she gave us great freedom to do what we thought was right.”
When you look at the documentary, it is striking how different New Zealand is from the United States, where it is difficult to imagine that many of the performance in the Arder’s administration is even possible, from turning off the entire country during Covid, saving 20,000 people’s lives, to ordering their citizens to turn in their arms. After Christchurch -Mosque shooting in March 2019, the government carried out strict reforms of weapons control. Within weeks, Parliament approved a ban on semi -automatic weapons in military style, almost unanimously. The month -long government repurchase program, at the end of 2019, gathered over 56,000 prohibited firearms and almost 200,000 illegal weapons parts. “It’s surreal to look at this,” Utz said, “because it feels like another planet.”
The parliamentary system in New Zealand also benefits the election of women in Parliament. The Arder is still something of a unicorn in today’s tumultuous right inclined times. “You see the political will behind the scenes,” Utz said. “And you see the passion, and you feel her commitment to these issues. We did not want to make a movie that was dissecting all of her policies. We wanted this to be an intimate, Personal Journey of a Woman on the World Stage: Looks like to have a supportive partner. This was a family story, too.
Another aspect of the Arder story: New Zealand has always been a progressive country. But it did not protect her when the wolves began to circle. Her popularity rose and then fell after months of organized protests. “Russian cells pumped disinformation to New Zealand,” Utz said. “New Zealand’s generally interacted with the disinformation at a much higher rate than other countries at that time. Of course, it was the anti -cake’s feeling that we saw in many places in the world, which became a powerful strength. And Quanon and our American politics were seen and studied and admired.”
When the economy refueled after Covid, the Arder was under enormous pressure and decided to resign before the end of his mandate. “Many people have anger towards her, still to this day, about her politics,” said UTZ, “(says) that they were too draconian, too strict, put too much emphasis on life and not enough on the economy, even if (Ardern’s government) did a lot to support families and people during the pandemic. You could find people on both sides.”
When the film meets theaters, Utz is “secretly happy that we got a movie about a progressive politician for theaters all over the country,” she said. “It feels like something unique right now. People are desperate for some light and some inspiration. And she’s good at it.”
Where the Arder goes follows the applause. “We couldn’t move anywhere in Park City without being stopped by someone in the streets,” Utz said. “Since then it has played at festivals, and we get the same reaction everywhere. There are tangible feelings in the room. We opened Sundance Mexico City last week. It beats a nerve, it touches something inside.”
At her live call Los Angeles event, Ardern held the audience in his hand. She knows where laughter and moan is and that she represents the polar opposite of Donald Trump. She is all that our current administration is not. And she offers hope what an alternative can look like.
She told a story about the early days of her experience of Parliament. After a particularly incredible debate round one day, the Arder went to one of the tougher politicians and asked how she would harden. He said, “Just a minute, don’t be harder. If you harden you will lose your empathy, and that’s what will do you well at your job.”
It was the moment, said the Arder, “that I decided to actually thin -skin sensitivity, that is all empathy. And he was right, if I lost it, I lost something else. So it would just have to be the price I would pay. Politics would feel hard, but maybe it was meant to feel hard.”
From there, the Arder learned to ignore comments, filter, avoid reviews. “I would decide when I got involved on social media and when I didn’t,” said Ardern. “And when I was prime minister, I knew the media, and it was a scared grace, because it meant I was handling the day, not the comment for the day, and that meant that I always stood forward, rather than trying to correct something that had happened before.”
She also took control of her schedule. “I was in a role where it was assumed that you couldn’t,” the Arder said. And she focused on finding quality time for her child. “What I thought the hardest thing was that I might be physically there, but I wasn’t always mentally there. And so if I were to be home at that time, I had to get bathing time. I thought about the memories I wanted that time, and I didn’t want her to see a stressed mother.”
At the end of “Prime Minister”, Ardern and Gaylord marry. “It’s always good,” Utz said. “Can you have a wedding? Use it.”
“Prime Minister” opens from Magnolia Pictures on Friday, June 13.
