I was at the library looking at what DVDs they had, and sadly they had very little (it seems that films get rented very fast) but they did have this documentary, which caught my eye.The documentary follows the student elections at Stuyvesant High School, the most prestigious public high school in New York. The film follows four teams as they campaign, and at the primaries two of those teams get chosen to go on to the election. The student council, unlike most schools, has a fair bit of power in that they get to decide how they spend thousands of dollars for various student activities.
Of the four teams, one isn't shown at all (safe for one scene in which they talk and mention that they don't think anyone knows they are running), and the other three have the predictable high school students: the popular kid who believes he'll win because everyone loves him, the super eager nerdy kid who strongly believes in the process and it is his whole live, and the girl who wants to do everything in order to pad her resume (who also happens to be a movie star, by which I mean she had a role in Palindromes).
The film is another in a recent series of high school documentaries, along the lines of American Teen and Spellbound. With any documentary it is hard to gauge how much is real and how much is scripted, especially considering a lot of it is filmed in a public high school. Considering the hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage they must have had, they made a very entertaining portrayal of school politics.
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