Shenk’s desire to shoot a candid, intimate portrait of an incumbent national leader was unprecedented: “We were trying to come up with examples to tell him, well, it’s going to be kind of like this film, kind of like that film – but he’s a president – in hindsight, I can’t believe he let us do it. He jokes that he thought we would go away after a while. I think it was an easy sell in the sense that he’s very committed to transparency of government. We lost a lot of battles, but we won a lot of battles. I think when you watch the film you see someone who’s just a person, someone who’s trying very hard to do something and you see that he’s not always succeeding and it wears on him and he’s exhausted and sometimes he wins and sometimes he loses but what’s undeniable is that he’s a real person with real feelings.”

What is refreshing about Nasheed is not just his optimism, his authenticity, but his willingness to expose his vulnerability and admit his doubts in undertaking that appears to be an almost Sisyphean task: “One reaction to the film is: I wish he were my president. American Politics has gotten to be so unreal; those going into politics aren’t necessarily the best and the brightest. I think the give and take with the media is so intense and difficult to navigate that maybe what was good and true in you in the first place doesn’t feel like a good attribute to have when you get into the game. Nasheed basically stays true to his principles. That’s part of the magic to him. You have to ask what makes him like that – I think it is a choice, you can decide to be honest or not, you can decide to stick to your principles or not, these are conscious decisions. It’s uncommon to maintain that persistence and that consistency of vision.