Please Vote for Me

Please Vote for Me
Directed by Weijun Chen

(taken from pleasevoteforme.org)

Is democracy a universal value that suits human nature? Do elections inevitably lead
to manipulation? Please Vote for Me is a portrait of a society and a town in through
a school, its children and its families.

Wuhan is a city about the size of London located in central China. It is here that director Weijun Chen has conducted an experiment in democracy. A Grade 3 class
at Evergreen Primary School has their first encounter with democracy by holding an election to select a Class Monitor.
Eight-year-olds compete against each
other for the coveted position, abetted and egged on by teachers and doting parents.

Elections in China take place only within
the Communist Party, but recently millions
of Chinese voted in their version of Pop
Idol. The purpose of Weijun Chen's experiment is to determine how
democracy would be received if it
came to China.

The film is one of ten selected as part of the Why Democracy? project, which saw interpretations of democracy by 10 film makers from around the world broadcast on 42 television networks in October, 2007, to audiences of more than 300 million people in nearly every country in the world.

The poster alone made me really wanna see it. And the hype around it made me quite eager. It won several awards last year several film festivals. My Thoughts? It lives up to the hype. Very very entertaining. Just under an hour, it was fun to see how the kids would handle this type of pressure...I couldn't have handled that ish when I was that age, forget about it. Some good twists in it actually, and I ended up rooting for one of them (the underdog of course) All in all, good watch, everyone should see it.

-Sam
FE