Former NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern to visit Glasgow to promote movie

Former New Zealand prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern is to visit Scotland next month as she promotes a film about her time in power.

Dame Jacinda will be in Glasgow on Friday November 21 to take part in a question and answer session after a screening of the movie documentary Prime Minister.

The event, at the Glasgow Film Theatre, will be her only only in-person appearance outside of London to promote the film, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The movie, Prime Minister, is said to offer an intimate portrait of her time in power blending home footage shot by her husband with never-before-heard audio recorded during her years as New Zealand’s leader.

Co-directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe go behind the scenes of her administration and private life, tracking her as she guided her country through a deadly volcanic eruption, its worst-ever terror attack – the Christchurch mosque shootings which killed 51 people – and the global Covid pandemic.

The movie begins with her appointment as leader of the Labour party in New Zealand in August 2017, just weeks ahead of the October general election which led to her becoming prime minister.

At that time she became the youngest female head of government anywhere in the world, taking charge of her country at the age of 37.

She then became the second ever head of an elected government to give birth while in office, when she had her daughter in June 2018.

But in January 2023 she announced she was resigning from the post, saying that she “didn’t have enough in the tank”.

Her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, was released in June this year.

Tickets for the showing of Prime Minister, with the Q&A, go on sale on Tuesday October 28 at 1.30pm from glasgowfilm.org and the GFT Box Office.

The movie will be released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on December 5.