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Prime Minister (2025 film)
Documentary film about Jacinda Ardern From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Prime Minister is a 2025 documentary film about Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023.[3] The film is directed by Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe. It premiered in January 2025 at the Sundance Film Festival.[4]
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Synopsis
The 102-minute film documents the five years of Ardern's tenure,[5] including both her political and private life.[6] It contains audio recordings of the Political Diaries project of the Alexander Turnbull Library and home videos recorded by Ardern's husband Clarke Gayford.[7] The film includes information on the Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption and the COVID-19 pandemic.[8][9]
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Production and release
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After Ardern resigned from her role as prime minister in 2023, Dark Doris Entertainment asked Ardern for permission to create a documentary about her. Ardern agreed and Dark Doris Entertainment was given Gayford's recordings for use in the film.[10][5] She later said that "I was sometimes a reluctant participant".[5] Ardern has said that she supports the film because it did not use funding by the New Zealand Film Commission.[7] The documentary was publicly announced in June 2024,[11] and premiered in January 2025 at the Sundance Film Festival,[7] where it won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary.[12]
The film was co-produced by the companies MWM and Dark Doris Entertainment. It was directed by New Zealander Michelle Walshe and American Lindsay Utz and produced by Cass Avery, Leon Kirkbeck, Clarke Gayford, Gigi Pritzker, Rachel Shane and Katie Peck.[8][13] Gayford has also been named a director of photography but was not involved in the directing or the editing.[14]
In May 2025, Magnolia Pictures, HBO Documentary Films and CNN Films acquired distribution rights to the film, setting it for a 13 June 2025 release in the United States.[15] The release date for New Zealand has not yet been announced.[16]
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Reception
The film received positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 34 critics' reviews are positive.[17] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[18]
After watching the film, Ardern said that "I cried through most of it, and I'm not sure if that's equivalent to laughing at your own jokes. I was very emotional watching it. I credit the storytellers for it."[7] She has also said that "[The film-makers] took the opportunity to tell the whole story – the highs, the lows, the good, the bad, and the ugly".[19]
Film critic Caryn James wrote for The Hollywood Reporter that "It would be a bit of an exaggeration, but just a bit, to say it trolls Donald Trump ... it includes deliberate, pointed contrasts that position Ardern as the American leader's exact opposite in their approaches and objectives."[20][8]
References
External links
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