In spring 2003, Finland's first female Prime Minister was inaugurated. The leader of the Centre Party, Anneli Jaatteenmaki, led her party to an electoral victory by challenging the ruling Social Democratic Party and its leader, Paavo Lipponen. In election debates, Jaatteenmaki accused Lipponen of pulling Finland into the US-led alliance against Iraq, basing her information on the so-called Iraq memorandum compiled by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. However, it was revealed that the Iraq memorandum was a classified report. The advisor of the President, Martti Manninen, who had faxed the information to Jäätteenmaki, was accused of violating official secrets. Manninen was dismissed from his post, and, only a couple of months into her appointment, Jäätteenmaki was forced to resign from the premiership. After six years, this political scandal re-emerged in public when the Finnish Broadcast Company (YLE) screened a dramatised account of the incident, Pääministeri (‘The Prime Minister’, Finland, 2009). Although the drama did not further inflame political disputes, it attracted the public's attention. It was estimated that the drama reached nearly 700,000 viewers, which is a substantial figure in Finland (Anonymous 2009).

In autumn 2012, an even more dramatic true story was screened in cinemas throughout Sweden. The documentary Palme (Sweden, 2012) tells the life story of the famous Swedish politician and former Prime Minister Olof Palme. The film deals with the traumatic national memories that have lingered in Sweden since the assassination of Palme in the winter of 1986. The assassination shocked Swedish society and is still an unsolved crime. Interest in Palme may partly explain why the film Palme attracted an unusually large audience for a documentary – over 240,000 cinema admissions in autumn 2012 (Swedish Film Institute 2013: 7, 9).

Palme and Pääministeri can be considered exceptional films in their respective national contexts. Politics and public figures have not been a typical subject for contemporary feature films in Sweden or in Finland, although similar topics have thrived in Anglo-American media culture. Films like The Deal (UK, 2003), Looking for Fidel (USA, Brazil, 2004), The Queen (UK, France, Italy, 2006) and Margaret (UK, 2009) have depicted the political past and present by portraying the experiences or actions of known politicians in different generic modes, such as documentary dramas, documentaries and fictional biographical films.