Portrait of Chloe
- Amanda Riddell
- Mar 18
- 2 min read
Chloe's part of the story is the part where I didn't film any of it. Except for the day where we first met at the Cannabis Referendum Conference, none of that footage was mine. As for how she comes off in the film... it shows some of the seams, but ultimately she's always on for the camera. That's what I eventually realised: even the fake-real stuff is game. If you took out the tunes and my animations, she'd seem boring. But it's not her job to be exciting. It's her job to be boring and sensible. If you combine that with her natural sense of showmanship and our antics, then you get bursts of the film in which it almost seems cool to vote Green. Season 3 really gets stuck into the Greens, though, and that's my reaction to their views on my crush and what I thought was some condescending bullshit about my transition. - The film isn't really a project that the Greens or TPM had much to do with, but invoking Marama or Rawiri and Debs probably helped open some doors. - Painting over it made her archetypal, but she was doing that with her branding in 2020, and to a certain extent from her 2016 Mayoral campaign. I'd say this was more like orchestrating those Merrily tracks: painting over someone else's thing and attempting to keep to the spirit of it.
The VFX enhanced Chloe, but that's the real person shining through.
Chloe's more like Jacinda than people realise: extremely good communicator, weirdo from some small religious minority, media savvy. She does it her way, but that's the template she's been drawing from.
Though her leadership wasn't quite up to it last year, I'm still confident in my belief that she could become PM.