First the book and now the movie. Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s memoir A Different Kind of Power has been keeping the nation’s bookshops in business in past weeks. Now comes the US-NZ documentary Prime Minister as the centrepiece of this year’s NZ International Film Festival.
The film, partly shot by Ardern’s husband Clarke Gayford in a series of video diaries while she was in office, was released theatrically in the US last month, just as A Different Kind of Power became a New York Times bestseller. Its screenings in the NZIFF’s 10 centres will be the first in her home country.
Ardern and Gayford won’t be attending the first showing in Auckland on August 2, which is a pity if only because it would have been a rare instance of a former NZ premier attending a NZ premiere for a film about her time as premier.
But it’s likely to be a boon for the festival’s coffers anyway. This year’s NZIFF has increased its number of features and sessions, following the post-Covid austerity measures it took last year. Those reduced the run from 17 days to 10, which also dropped ticket sales nationwide from 138,000 in 2023 to 92,000 in 2024. Last year’s Auckland event featured 80 or so features in 130 screenings across three venues. This year’s 10-day event has about 110 features in 220-plus screenings across six venues, including three suburban cinemas, with Wellington having about the same.
Prime Minister isn’t the only film about a NZ dame in the festival. Grace: A Prayer for Peace about artist Dame Robin White is directed by Dame Gaylene Preston, who in 2017 delivered My Year with Helen, her own documentary about a former PM.
The 2025 programme’s “treasures” retrospective section has Preston’s 1995 doco War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, about the wartime experiences of her mum’s generation.
Counting those two titles, that makes 11 times a Preston feature has appeared at the festival. Yet she’s only the second most-prolific New Zealand director in NZIFF history.
First place is still held by stalwart arts documentary maker Shirley Horrocks, who maintains her lead with another feature, Anchor Me – The Don McGlashan Story, her 13th festival title. The project about the national-treasure songwriter has been a few years in the making and gone through several titles. His now immortal words at the Aotearoa Music Awards to politician Chris Bishop – “Shut up, you dickhead” – possibly arrived too late for consideration.
McGlashan’s occasional sideman, Shayne Carter, best known for his own bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer, is also the subject of a documentary. Life in One Chord premieres in hometown Dunedin on August 16. Reluctant to narrate from his memoir Dead People I Have Known himself, he suggested to director Margaret Gordon to get broadcaster Carol Hirschfeld, who duly agreed.
Another prominent arts figure featuring in a festival doco is the former Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curator Nigel Borell, who resigned shortly after the opening of the landmark exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art in 2020. The documentary, TOITŪ Visual Sovereignty, is by Chelsea Winstanley and the programme describes it as “an unprecedented insight into the struggle for Māori artistic sovereignty in our cultural institutions.”
On a less serious note – and another case of first the book, now the movie – is Not Only Fred Dagg, a doco about the late John Clarke made by daughter Lorin Clarke. It follows her recent memoir, Would that be funny?: Growing up with John Clarke. The film about the godfather of Kiwi comedy was funded by the Melbourne International Film Festival, which unfortunately means it won’t screen in Auckland because it’s too soon after the MIFF premiere.
Among the New Zealand features debuting in the festival is the dramedy Workmates, from the Baby Done partnership of screenwriter-actor Sophie Henderson and director husband Curtis Vowell, which is set backstage at a theatre.
Anyone hoping to see Pike River, Robert Sarkies’ drama about the 2010 West Coast mining disaster, which had its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival last month, will have to wait until its general release in October.
As is usual, the NZIFF has picked up a fair swag of Cannes Film Festival contenders. The main 2025 Auckland and Wellington programmes have 12 of the 22 films that were “In Competition” at the influential French festival.
That includes Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme D’Or winning It Was Just an Accident, which will be the opening night film at all 10 NZ events, and Sentimental Value, by Norwegian director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), which won the runner-up Grand Prix and will be the NZIFF closing night title.
Among other notable director names featuring this year are Richard Linklater and David Cronenberg. The former is behind Blue Moon, his biopic of songwriter Lorenz Hart – of Great American Songbook partnership Rodgers & Hart – while the Canadian art-horror veteran has The Shrouds, a macabre meditation on mourning, seemingly inspired by the death of his wife.
The NZIFF starts in Auckland July 31; Christchurch August 8; Wellington August 14; Dunedin August 15; Hamilton, Napier, Tauranga, Nelson, and Masterton Aug 28. The full programme is out in print and online from July 7.
