Took today off work for an excursion to the city -- Sylvia and I took my parents to the Bronx Zoo for a fun tiring afternoon. Afterwards we met Ellen at the China Institute in Manhattan, where we watched Weijun Chen's stunning new documentary, Please Vote for Me -- a chronicle of the campaign for 3rd-grade class monitor at Evergreen Primary School in Wuhan, China. Every year up until now*, class monitor has been appointed by the teacher; her innovation this year is to select  three candidates and have them campaign for the office. You get to watch the class (through the eye of the the documentarian, who manages to insinuate himself completely into the fabric of the kids' days) independently create a primitive democracy, complete with patronage, bribery, voter intimidation... The kids are just marvelous, completely unself-conscious on camera, totally engaged in being themselves. I had to sort of guard against over-interpreting what they were doing and saying -- at the beginning of the movie I was trying to read each thing said by one of the children as having special deep significance -- but when I got myself to quit that and just engage with them as children, I was really able to get into it and identify with the three candidates and watch them figure out how to campaign. I'd recommend the movie strongly to anybody interested in democracy and elections, which a lot of people seem to be interested in that nowadays. It was of course especially great timing for us to see what with Sylvia being that age -- I could recognize mannerisms and behaviors of Sylvia and her friends, from the kids in the movie -- but I think I would have loved it even without that element. It's available on Netflix. (Not only that, it's available for download on Netflix -- you can watch it right now!)
 * I'm not completely sure what year this was filmed -- maybe 2005 or 6?
posted evening of Friday, November 7th, 2008
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The guy that introduced the film mentioned how the boy candidates, treated as little emperors at home (which we see), in running for the first time in a democratic election, bring that entitlement along with them. The handheld camera, behind the scenes look into the school and family culture were just amazing.
posted morning of November 8th, 2008 by Ellen
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