A look at NYC's experiment in participatory democracy, where residents of certain neighborhoods were allowed to vote on how some city funds would be spent on in their neighborhood. It's basically a cinéma vérité documentary, and therein lies the problem: it's 25 minutes of, mostly, people in neighborhood meetings discussing possible projects. But there should have been more context other than a few lines of text on screen at the beginning, such as even the briefest explanation of the alternative, or status quo, of government spending at that level. Who decides, normally? What are the flaws in that system, etc. The interest here lies in the drama of seeing how people feel about the participatory scheme, yet we here from no one about what they learned from the process, or whether they felt more tied to their community, or any of a million other reactions they could have had. We don't know how long it took for some of the selected projects to come to fruition, or whether, once built, the community valued those projects as much as they thought they would when the selected them, etc. Granted, the above changes would have meant taking much longer to produce the doc, but it would have been more interesting than watching people sitting around a table with a wish list.
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