Monday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body responsible for nominating and selecting the winning films for the Academy Awards, announced the short list of 15 films competing for the Oscar for Best Documentary. If you’re not familiar with the AMPAS, this is the academy referred to in 99% of all Oscar acceptance speeches when winners say, “I’d like to thank the academy.”
Among the 15 films selected for the 2007 award was the big-budget Sicko, Michael Moore’s muckraking take on the American healthcare system, and the highly-touted No End In Sight, Charles Ferguson’s examination of how the Bush administration bungled the war in Iraq. Along with Ferguson’s film, seven more of the fifteen deal with current or past wars. In January, this short list will be cut down to five nominations, one of which will be named the best documentary of the year at the February 24 Oscar ceremony.
Two of the documentaries included on the Academy’s short list deal with China: Nanking, the American-made movie about the 1937 massacre of 30,000 Chinese by Japanese soldiers and a lesser known documentary entitled Please Vote for Me. As part of the BBC’s “Why Democracy?” documentary series, Please Vote For Me chronicles an experiment in democracy at the Evergeen Primary School in the Chinese city of Wuhan. In a third grade class, 8-year-old students are forced to elect a class monitor from three candidates who organize campaigns and resort to savvy and slimy political tactics to get votes. Ronault L.S. Catalani of the Asian Reporter described the film as having “compelling charm” and wrote of it:
Every old trick of “representative” leadership is played out in grandiose rises and moral tumbles, in triumph and in tears. This is wonderful documentary. No voiced-over supportive stats or pithy political science. Just three third-grade politicos, some reluctant, some shameless, yet all participants in a social experiment of unprecedented scale and consequence.
The film is directed by Weijun Chen, a Wuhan news reporter who made a name for himself with the 2003 documentary To Live is Better Than To Die, an investigation of the HIV/AIDS crisis in rural China. Please Vote for Me aired last month in America as part of the Independent Lens series on PBS, on the BBC in England and in 33 other countries around the world.
Video Clip from Please Vote for Me
Image: Scene from Please Vote for Me/Indiewire
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