He clearly had a fighting mentality at a young age, but when I talk to him about the time he spent in solitary confinement, for example, you hear that when a person comes face to face with the possibility of their own death, I’ve never been in that position, but I’ve heard it said before, that something clicks in you, you know, from this point on, if I survive, I’m going to double down, I’m going to commit myself to a better world. It’s a truism that runs through literature, that runs through films over the years that if you push someone to that extreme, you either break them, or they become even more committed. He clearly came out of that, and just flew off in that direction. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that he’s not trying to figure out how to make the world better. As he said in the film, he doesn’t want his daughters to go through what he went through.”

The film reaches a crescendo at the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, where Nasheed made an impassioned plea to the global community to cut emissions: “There was so much anticipation about what was going to happen, so much hope. There was so much focus on it from the world media, it was crazy, there was an energy there, it was very exciting. Trying to film it was overwhelming. We had been filming for about a year at that point, we were wise enough to know that if we were just delegated to being press we would never get where we needed to be, so we convinced the Maldivians to make us part of their delegation. We were with Nasheed when he went back to his hotel at night, or with his advisers outside when he was having a smoke. We just did whatever we could to maintain his point of view of the situation as a guiding principle, if we could just see Copenhagen as Nasheed sees it, that would be a victory.”