Sundance Review: “Prime Minister”

Prime Minister (Lindsay Utz/Michelle Walshe, 2025) 4 out of 5 stars

Born in 1980, Jacinda Ardern was elected Prime Minister of New Zealand in 2017. She was both the first woman to serve in that office and the youngest in over a century-and-a-half. A progressive politician—head of the Labour Party—she led her country via a left-leaning coalition that promoted equal rights for all. Unfortunately, though she was at one point extremely popular, the tide of opinion turned against her during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she resigned in 2023. In the new documentary Prime Minister, directors Michelle Walshe (Chasing Great) and Lindsay Utz offer a compelling portrait of a complex human being who emerged from the political wringer scarred but more thoughtful than ever.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is how we cut back and forth in time from the present—where Ardern teaches at Massachusetts’ Harvard University—to the past during her rise to power and before. Courtesy of New Zealand’s Alexander Turnbull Library and its political diary project, we listen to audio interviews with Ardern as events unfold during her leadership tenure, and also watch her revisiting them now. In this way, we see and hear a double perspective on what transpired.

There is also copious footage from those years, much of it courtesy of Ardern’s romantic partner (and now husband), Clarke Gayford, who filmed their home life and beyond, supplementing the more professionally shot material that makes up the rest of the narrative. And so we work our way through the early days of Ardern’s time in office, from the birth of her daughter, through the terrible Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019, the sweeping gun reforms that followed, and the reelection of the Labour Party in 2020, this time without need of a coalition partner to rule. And then came the pandemic.

Which New Zealand survived beautifully … in the first year. Ardern enacted strict quarantine rules that closed the borders, and by the end of 2020 there were no longer any reported cases in the country. Hurray! As we all know now, however, there was worse to come, including the (to me) inexplicable conspiracy theories fueled by right-wing fearmongers, many of them in the United States. Seeing Trump flags flying in New Zealand is truly odd.

The step from conspiracies to threats is a short one, and eventually Ardern began to worry about the safety of her family and her own ability to govern and lead the Labour Party after becoming a lightning rod for complaints. And so she stepped down. Though she seems tired of politics, perhaps there’s a second act in her future. She is still so young.

The movie does a good job both holding our interest and crafting a three-dimensional profile of its subject. Ardern is here presented without vanity, able to look back and ponder her own timeline and draw lessons from it. Though we don’t see what course she teaches at Harvard, I have no doubt, based on what we witness here, that she is an engaging, ruminative professor. Here’s hoping she will one day find her way back to a position of influence.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.