Helen Clark ― Inside Stories

New Zealand’s first elected woman prime minister; nine years in power through Afghanistan and Iraq, the "Corngate" and "Paintergate" affairs, the foreshore and seabed turmoil; head of the UN Development Program and ranked among the most powerful women in the world. Helen Clark’s public life is well known. But what about the inside stories? During 2012–2013, documentary-makers Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon interviewed a host of participants about the life of Helen Clark: Clark herself and her family, political friends and enemies, mentors and staffers, journalists and lobbyists. The resulting transcripts from those interviews, woven together here into a compelling narrative, offer a brilliantly multi-faceted, inside account of Helen Clark’s life and career. From her father George Clark to friend Cath Tizard, Richard Prebble to Jim Anderton, Winston Peters to Don Brash, Jacinda Ardern to John Key, Helen Clark and her contemporaries bring to life the tumultuous life and times of one of our most important political leaders. Through the words of the players themselves, sometimes raw, sometimes angry, we find ourselves taken inside the major political developments of the last fifty years. This is a frank, revealing account of Helen Clark and her world.

Claudia Pond Eyley is a visual artist and filmmaker. She studied at Elam and has lectured at the University of Auckland. She is the author, with Robin White, of28 Days in Kiribati and Protest at Moruroa and her documentaries includeDeparture and Return: The Final Journey of the Rainbow Warrior. Dan Salmon is a multi-award-winning director and producer of documentary (Made in Taiwan, Here to Stay) and drama (Licked,The Day Morris Left). His documentaries have screened on TVNZ, ABC, Al Jazeera and EBS in Korea, and at festivals in Tahiti, Canada and the United States. Pond Eyley and Salmon’s documentaryHelen, for which the interviews for this book were made, was screened on television in August 2013 and December 2014, as well as at the 2014 Documentary Edge Film Festival.