It’s rare to see a sitting world leader filmed not only in press conferences or cabinet meetings but in pyjamas, half-asleep, joking about a laundry basket. Prime Minister, the new documentary about Jacinda Ardern, captures that dissonance.
Directed by Lindsay Utz (American Factory, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry) and Michelle Walshe (Chasing Great), and produced by Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford, the film follows the former New Zealand Prime Minister from her unexpected rise in 2017 to her resignation in early 2023. It’s an unguarded, sometimes unsettling look at the private costs of public leadership.
The film opens with the shock of Ardern’s ascent: from 37-year-old opposition MP to leader of the Labour Party just weeks before the election, then Prime Minister two months later. She discovers she’s pregnant on the eve of victory, becoming only the second head of state in history to give birth while in office.
Those early sequences hum with adrenaline and disbelief, a sense of political destiny colliding with personal upheaval. Gayford’s home footage, shot with the ease of a television professional, gives an immediacy few political documentaries achieve. His camera lingers on mundane moments, such as late-night feeds, morning briefings over toast, that humanise a woman who became a global symbol of empathy.
That intimacy, though, carries an odd charge. Seeing a Prime Minister in bed, confiding to camera, feels almost too close. Ardern jokes that Clarke is “pretending to move the laundry basket for continuity.”
It’s a revealing line: self-aware, amused, but also hinting at the artifice of any self-documenting exercise. When history is watching, who isn’t performing a little? Yet Ardern has always seemed comfortable in transparency, and the film’s strength lies in that tension between authenticity and image.
Running through it all is her fascination with the explorer Ernest Shackleton. Her father would read her tales of Antarctic endurance; the metaphor is irresistible.
Shackleton’s optimism and refusal to abandon his crew become Ardern’s emotional compass during her own whiteouts: the Christchurch massacre, pandemic lockdowns, and the protests that flared as disinformation poisoned civic trust. Her determination to “get everyone home safely” during COVID feels, in hindsight, like Shackleton’s mission recast for a viral century.
The film spans an era when politics itself seemed to mutate. By the time Ardern steps down, exhausted and vilified by the same global attention that once canonised her, the world has weathered the storm of populism, conspiracy and pandemic polarisation.
Prime Minister doubles as a chronicle of that shift, from the hopeful 2017s to the anxious 2020s and a reflection on what leadership means in an age of radical empathy and radical scrutiny.
Most of the film’s voice belongs to Ardern and Gayford. There are ministers, advisers and journalists, but they are satellites orbiting a couple in real time. The result is almost autobiographical, less a detached political study than a diary with cinematic polish. Ardern shows self-awareness about her imposter syndrome, but this is still her version of the story.
What makes Prime Minister compelling is how ordinary it feels. A leader wiping crumbs off a counter after a crisis call is not something history books capture. In revealing the domestic rhythm behind the policy headlines, the film chips away at the two-dimensional caricatures that dominate modern politics.
Prime Minister doesn’t ask you to agree with Ardern’s decisions; it invites you to see the human making them.
Prime Minister opens in cinemas nationally from this Thursday, 6 November 2025.
Website: https://rialtodistribution.com/film/prime-minister-au-release/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/rialtodistributionau/
Watch the trailer below:
Film details:
Title: Prime Minister
Directors: Lindsay Utz, Michelle Walshe
Cast: Jacinda Ardern
Country of Origin: USA
Rating: M
Duration: 96 mins
