Please Vote for Me - Stefano R. Mugnaini - Mises Daily - StumbleUpon I recently watched Please Vote for Me. It is a documentary about a Chinese third-grade class that is given the unprecedented privilege of electing their own class monitors. The film is set in the city of Wuhan. I spent a wonderful year teaching English (or at least Southern English) in Hubei Province, just up the train line from Wuhan. The election process involves skits, song-and-dance routines, and a healthy dose of crying. Most striking is some of the dialogue between the candidates and their parents in the lead-up to the election. The teacher writes the word "democracy" on the board. One of the candidates, Cheng Cheng, gets home and asks his father, "What kind of thing is democracy?" Next, another child, Luo Lei, is shown describing the election process to his parents. I had to watch that part twice. The second lesson I took from this film is the allure of corruption — the corruption that feeds on power. But I was greatly encouraged by this film. Stefano R. Comment on the blog.
Year in Review: The 15 Best Foreign Films of 2009 Martyrs* (Pascal Laugier, France) This brutal, bloody, and occasionally terrifying movie also made Robert Fure’s Best Horror list, and it most definitely deserves the honor. A young girl is traumatized and grows up thirsty for revenge. Mother (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea) After the spectacle of his blockbuster monster movie The Host, Joon-ho scales it back and returns to the dark and moody procedural territory of his best film to date, Memories of Murder. Ong Bak 2* (Tony Jaa, Thailand) Film School Rejects called this the greatest martial arts film ever, and while I myself prefer to avoid the hyperbole I will agree that it comes pretty damn close. Pontypool* (Bruce McDonald, Canada) Who would have thought Canada would be the ones to bring an original spin to the zombie genre? A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, France) [Rec]* (Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, Spain) Revanche* (Gotz Spielmann, Austria) Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, Mexico) Thirst (Park Chan-wook, South Korea)