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‘Prime Minister’ Review: New Zealand Leader Jacinda Ardern Works Through Crisis in an Intimate but Simplistic Documentary
Few political docs have as much access as "Prime Minister," Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s film about New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern.
She mentions, in her interview voiceovers, a story of leadership her father once clung to, and which she now treats as her North Star: that of early-20th-century explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose ship, the Endurance, sank in the Antarctic in 1914, but who kept his crew alive for two years until their rescue. Ardern’s actual outlooks are usually skimmed past, or presented as broad ideological statements about social progress, with no mention of any of the financial policies (or tax promises un-kept) that would affect her approval beyond anti-vaccine fringe elements — a largely external factor framed as central to her resignation. “Prime Minister” may verge on hagiographic in its telling, but as a tale of political mythmaking — and a young woman in an world of right-wing strongmen — it’s greatly assisted by its intimate documents of Ardern.
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