What comes to mind when you think of a documentary? A film with serious narration, serious tone, tackling a serious topic?

Well, throw all that out the window and let me introduce Please Vote For Me, a 2007 documentary filmed in China.  With a runtime of only 58 minutes, it is director Chen Weijun’s second work and it won the Sterling Award at SilverDocs that year.

Please Vote For Me follows three students of a 3rd-grade class in Evergreen Primary School as they run for the position of class monitor.  The film tackles the heavy question “what is democracy?” through the chaotic experiences of the eight-year-olds.

While it makes us laugh at the children’s silliness, the film also highlights the dirty tricks many politicians in a democratic society use to win votes.  The decision to make children the main characters is a good one as it reflects how China is slowly becoming more democratic while also revealing their inexperience.

There is an impressive lack of narration throughout the film; information is given through visuals and the students’ day-to-day interactions—the film trusts its audience to infer the message by themselves.  No sequence is redundant.  For example, a simple shot of students standing in ridiculously straight rows during assembly is used to hint at China’s rigid political structure.

The three main characters—Cheng Cheng, Xu Xiaofei, and Luo Lei—are fleshed out authentically through well-edited scenes showing their relationship and interactions with family and friends.  As the competition heats up, we get to see their parents play a part in the elections as well, which makes us question whether adults are truly role models for children.

Please Vote For Me is like ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ but with social introspection baked in—we watch people with no self-awareness compete for power they think they are worthy of wielding.  Very few documentaries can make you reflect on society as you laugh at the shenanigans of eight-year-olds, but Chen’s film pulls it off spectacularly.

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Megan is a student from Singapore Polytechnic who loves watching shows and reading books. She sees reviewing as the most effective way to convince friends and family to watch the shows she recommends. She also has an unfortunate love for horrible puns and unleashes them on friends and family all day, every day.