After nine years as NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg is ready to hang up his hat and return home to his wife in Norway. His plans for a quieter life are put on hold, however, as President Joe Biden asks him to extend his time in the position for an additional year. Stoltenberg made a promise to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: that NATO would stand by Ukraine's side until the end. Not an easy promise to keep with no end to the war in sight and tensions between member countries continuing to escalate.
With unprecedented access to NATO’s inner sanctum, this dynamic and utterly absorbing documentary throws us into the rough waters of political nuance and big egos. Stoltenberg navigates them skillfully, with a mastery of diplomacy and devotion to compromise and dialogue, even when the challenging personalities of figures like Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdogan are involved.
One might not expect a film about NATO to be so emotive: chilling yet hopeful. To paraphrase Stoltenberg, many countries that have fought for centuries are now friends. One day, we will all have to speak to Russia again. Kinga Binkowska.