Frontrunners

Frontrunners is a delightful film about the student elections at Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant is obviously not the typical high school, but the student elections are definitely similar to most student elections at any other high school in the United States. It makes for an interesting insight into how student elections work and how similar they are to the presidential elections.

I started watching Frontrunners right after I watched a movie called "Palindromes" which just so happens to feature Hannah Freiman as one of the main actors. I didn't realize that she would be in both films, and it caught me by surprise. However, after watching Palindromes, it was neat seeing Hannah as a real person rather than her character in Palindromes. Her character is a really awkward 13-year-old that is trying to get pregnant, so it was interesting to see that Hannah was actually a popular cheerleader in real life.

I thought the whole documentary was entertaining and very funny. The student candidates pretty much made the film. If the students were boring and mundane, the film would have been much of the same. However, I suppose students that choose to run in the elections are typically interesting characters. I found George to be extremely entertaining, and it didn't even seem as though he was acting that way because he was being filmed. It seemed like he acts in that manner every day.

The documenting of the student elections seemed organic; it didn't seem contrived as if there was a camera following the students around. I'm sure that there was not a camera in the students' faces the whole time during the election, but obviously, there was a camera there for all the parts that we saw.

Overall, I thought the film was great!

Released on Election Eve in 2008, Caroline Suh's 'Frontrunners' capitalizes on our appetite for the vicissitudes, gaffes and drama of the electoral race. Set at Stuyvesant High School in New York, the United States' most prestigious public high school where over half the student population is Asian (note the unsurprising correlation), the film tracks the campaigns of the four tickets as they vie for the role of Senior President.

The parallels that can be drawn with national electoral races are quickly made apparent. Race is of vital importance - all the serious tickets are multi-ethnic - and it is clear that one candidate has chosen his running mate based on her Asian ethnicity alone. Friends and associates are drawn in to help with campaigning, each ticket adopting the classic high-school approach of harassing younger students with leaflets. The little matter of policies is ignored, very deliberately and quite fittingly by Suh, in favour of exposing what really matters to most voters, how the candidates come across in person. The old adage of 'would you have a beer with them?' has never been more apparent.

The candidates are drawn conveniently from a cross-section of school life anywhere. George is the Greek, chess-playing, socially awkward nerd, Mike is the suave, smart Junior Year President and Hannah is the athletic, cheer-leading, theatre club President. The final candidate, a basket-baller without the necessary school positions to fill out the lines on his running ticket, is sadly never considered (a cruel editing decision).

The difficulty however with Stuyvesant's election is that despite appearing to relate to your own school experience by drawing on similar characters, the nature of the school serves only to disassociate the viewer. How many of us went to schools where the budget for the Student Union exceeded $50,000? Or had live-televised debates for its student elections? Or even primaries for that matter? The real parallel, and one that certainly I can recall, is the apathy, an aspect of the election that Suh doesn't really engage with. If anything, the election, and the effect of it's results, is profoundly exaggerated. This is America's number one public high school, where you would expect the students to care about student politics, why is it therefore that the apathy is as high as at any mediocre high school? For all its faults though, Suh's film is an easy watch. As we are shown the candidates fighting for the endorsement of the student newspaper, using dirty tricks to expose competitors in the live debates and pressuring friends into voting for them, genuine drama is undoubtedly created. The candidates are engaging in their own ways and you will no doubt find your favourite and cheer them home. Just don't expect powerful insights into the nature of our more meaningful political races.

Concluding Thought: This is the best public high school in the United States, and only 600 of the 3200-strong student body bothered voting? Maybe apathy is the real story?

Frontrunners had its world premiere here in Austin, TX at the SXSW film festival. It is a charming delightful film about several different students running for the Presidency of the Student Union at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. The film captures the young student leaders learning the art of politics at one of America's best high schools. Stuyvesant acts as a microcosm of all that is good and bad in American politics and education today.

The film is both a picture of Stuyvesant High School and of the political world into which the students are growing up in. The film seems to reflect some of the archetypes of politics - change vs. experience - that are currently playing out in the US Presidential campaign. You also see apathy, punditry, political consulting play out in the microcosm of high school politics. The film is enhances by the idiosyncratic personalities of several of the students. The music also adds to the film. The viewer can't help being drawn in and wonder who will win and who will lose. The film is emotional, enjoyable, and educational.

I hope that this film draws a wider audience. It might even be a useful film to show in high schools to teach students about the political process.

If you're not from the tri-state area, chances are you've never heard of Stuyvesant High School. Though it is the top math and science school in New York City, with an average SAT score in the 1400s, the school that receives twenty-five thousand applicants a year but only accepts the top 750 runs more like a university than a public secondary school. Stuyvesant, therefore, is by no means a "typical" American high school, so just what, then, made this the quintessential place for Director Caroline Suh to study a "typical" high school election?

"The minute I said I wanted to do a film about the lives of high school candidates, a friend said I had to check out Stuyvesant," Suh explains. Perhaps simply for the fact that it is so unlike any other place: it is a surreal, seemingly fictional world all on its own that tries to run like a microcosm of the real world, just in a place where everything is really trivial in the end.

Frontrunners is not about Stuyvesant, though; it is about the students at Stuyvesant-- a very select few who, although each are unique, do not seem interesting enough to warrant their own documentary. When thrown together, though, their different personalities compliment each other in an odd way and serve to show their school as a bit more well-rounded than is assumed when someone hears the words "math and science technical school." Suh does not turn a blind eye to the biggest part of high school, though-- the popularity of the students-- but she allows her subjects to be the ones to point out the fact that the "cheerleaders would vote for Hannah, and the quieter Asians would vote for George, and the Russian kids would probably vote for Mike."

Suh focuses on who these candidates are and how they campaign, from the reflective George who integrates science terminology into everyday speech in a way that you know would get him stuffed in a locker at just about any other place in the country, let alone the rough and tough city that is New York, to the eager and outgoing actress Hannah, who aside from her political aspirations has also appeared opposite Ellen Barkin in a feature film and guest starred on Law & Order. Suh's camera is a fly on the wall inside these hallowed halls, watching as these kids agonize over such seeming adult decisions during the primaries. Some may have to re-prioritize their extracurriculars, but all have to put themselves out to be judged in the "public eye" in a place and time when most just try to fit in. If nothing else, the sheer amount of pressure and stress these kids put upon themselves is courageous but also simply stunning to watch. Perhaps the one slight injustice is that Suh does not mention the elephant in the room: though racial politics certainly come into play here, not one of the candidates for Student Union President represents the majority of the school as an Asian American student. Suh may not have been given such a candidate, but she doesn't interview and explore why not either.

Suh met surprisingly little resistance from the Stuyvesant community, and she knows she is blessed for it. Should one candidate (or candidate's parent, since they were all under the age of eighteen at the time of filming) refused to be on camera, her production would have been virtually shut down; she had to be free to roam wherever her subjects roamed and experience whatever they did. Perhaps as a thank you for the hospitality, then, Suh does not exploit the missteps of the young politicians; she shows where they make mistakes or slip up, sure, but she does not linger the way for which a reality show camera has trained us to look out. Never biased, she never leads her audience toward supporting one candidate or another, and even when one in particular takes some mean-spirited advice from a bitter gym-teacher-turned-dean about how he should rip apart his opponent in the debate, Suh skates over the scene, as if trying to soften the blow and dilute the implications to protect the scrutiny of her young subject. In a way, Suh's documentary is much more mothering than one might expect for the harsh, cold world high school has become (or at least fictionally depicted) of late.

There are no twists to Frontrunners; there is no high drama involving a personal scandal or fledging grades affecting the outcome of a campaign. In fact, we rarely see these kids outside of their safe zone of Stuyvesant High School, and perhaps because of that, they don't really drop their guard, and we don't get to know them much as people beyond what's on their resume. Frontrunners can be seen, then, as almost a video diary for their college application-- all squeaky clean, professional, and trying to change the world-- but that can't be genuine all of the time, can it? So in that regard, Frontrunners is mundane, but nothing in it was faked for dramatic effect, either, so it's hard to compare it to anything in the past and call it dull. Stuyvesant is like no other high school, but it's student election is surprisingly similar to those held in every high school in every city or town across the country. There are no surprises here, no matter how much your post-millennium film viewing has trained you to expect otherwise. The only real thing left to wonder about after viewing Frontrunners is whether or not the cut-and-dry way it plays out will mirror itself in the real November 4th election. At any other time, this film would probably screen only in private, to lightly sprinkled crowds made up of only Stuy alumni, but the timing couldn't be better, or the subject matter be more relevant, so Frontrunners will be granted a run of its own in select theaters on October 24th.

"FrontRunners," which had its World Premiere in the competition section at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival, is a reminder of just how powerful a good documentary can be.

Director Caroline Suh followed four teams of candidates running for Student Council President and Vice President at New York's Stuyvesant High School, one of the most selective and prestigious in the nation. George Zisiadis is the geek who's too smart for his own good. Michael Zaytsev is the cool one who, since he gets the girls, figure he'll get the votes as well. Hannah Freiman, the lone woman of the four, feels that alone sets her apart (well, she's right on that account), not to mention her popularity as a cheerleader. And Matt Polazzo is the basketball player who's running because, well, it looks like a fun thing to do.

The kids couldn't have been more endearing if this came out of the top casting agency in the city, but they are very real. It's hard not to laugh at their innocent sincerity. They are among the best and brightest yet still have the unjaded idealism of youth. Their campaign methods could teach adults a thing or two -- George places himself at the top of the steps of the bridge the kids have to cross to get to school. That way, they "have to look up at him," making him "psychologically superior in their minds." He blasts their favorite music as he hands out flyers, and it's part of a soundtrack which doesn't pander to the audience. The music is not evocative of our own youth -- not necessarily what we would listen to -- it's the music they listen to, and that's another element that sets this film apart from others of its type.

The camera never invades their space. These kids are smart enough to know how to act when the lens is pointing at them but one never gets the feeling they would have done anything different if it wasn't. They bare their souls and allow us to enter their world -- when they laugh, we laugh. When they cry (well, they don't really cry -- they just get misty eyed the way kids do when they don't want to show it) we tear up along with them. The film has its sweet moments, as any good documentary should, but its mostly hilarious -- these kids are so clever, so smart, so wise. What's scary, though (or not) is that these Stuyvesant grads are much more likely to actually end up in state houses or in Washington than those from other schools. It's left to the viewer to decide if the next generation "gets it" or not.

"FrontRunners" is what other films of its ilk aspire to be -- funny, poignant, and totally engaging. In the end you wish the credits didn't have to roll -- you want to stay with these kids. "FrontRunners" wins my vote.