Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

"If you don't agree with me, then take pity on me and vote for me!"

After watching Please Vote for Me, the first thing I did was go online and make sure that this was a true documentary, and not a clever mockumentary. Apparently, everything you see and hear in this film is completely legit, which is a truly head-spinning prospect. It centers on a group of third-grade students in present-day China who undergo a simple social experiment -- a democratic election in their classroom to determine who will become the classroom monitor. Instead of paying attention to this project with half an eye or treating it with easy sarcasm, as you would expect most American students to do, these Chinese students throw themselves into the election body and soul, applying to it what could almost be called life and death stakes. All seemingly without the guidance of teachers, they cook up plots to topple competing candidates, enlist fellow students as political consultants, modify their behavior around potential rivals and supporters in order to make things go their way, and exploit vulnerabilities in their opponents that you can scarcely believe a third-grader would consider.

The election is quickly boiled down to three students: a tough and skinny boy, Luo Lei, with a reputation as a classroom leader and bully; another boy, Cheng Cheng, who is somewhat pudgy and aggressively political in nature, seems to plan out every step he takes, and is constantly gauging his own support, and then there's a third candidate, a shy but ambitious little girl named Xiafei. Each of the children are presumably products of China's one-child policy, and throughout the film we see their parents, not so much doting on them as monitoring their progress as closely as a parole officer might monitor a recently released inmate. Only Xiafei seems to feel the intense pressure she's under, and at one point in the film she breaks down crying in the middle of class and is escorted out. One of her rival candidates will eventually use this outburst against her during a debate, asking aloud how she could possibly be the right person to lead a classroom of students if she's not strong enough to keep her tears bottled up.