A lot has been written about this film. It won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Documentary in 1975. Entertainment Weekly named it one of the Top 50 Documentaries of all time. And while it is distinctly not unbiased, it is very thorough, including footage and interviews with heads of state, military leaders, Vietnamese peasants, current and former soldiers, draft dodgers and even random people off the street.
Made in more than a year before the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War was still ongoing at the time, Hearts and Minds is a document of the times, but given many of the events of the 2000s, it’s one that’s still relevant today.
The final 15 minutes of the film contains the still shocking images of child napalm victims running down the road, which unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 35 years you’ve probably seen dozens of times, but which still packs an emotional wallop.
Which brings me to a documentary of an entirely different sort…
Please Vote For Me
Please Vote For Me documents the class election of a “class monitor” in a 3rd grade class in Wuhan, China, supposedly the first such election anywhere in China for this position. The position is a bit of a cross between class president, and the kind of “informant” that the Chinese Communist Party has relied on since the very early days of the Communist Revolution there. The students did not demand a class election, they were just told they were going to have one, and were given no background in democracy or the democratic process by seemingly equally oblivious teachers, and all sorts of bribery and corruption work it’s way into the system, aided and abetted by the children’s own parents.
Democracy is something that must be embraced by those who want it, and whether it was the filmmakers’ intention to or not, Please Vote For Me accurately illustrates why democracy can never be imposed on people and efforts to do so are ultimately doomed to failure.
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