Vladimir Klimenko

Speaking as a person of the left, I thought that this film was terribly disappointing. I went in with high hopes. The broad spectrum of subjects didn't necessarily bother me as much as the sheer superficiality and incoherence of the argument. Beautifully filmed (kudos to the cinematography), "What Is Democracy" is nevertheless superficial, painfully one-sided (even if from my own side), and conceptually/organizationally sloppy. It conflates a critique of the financialization of the global economy with 7th grade public school children in the United States not being able to control their education at school with the fact that Syrian refugees don't find a welcome in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. The director asks a variety of people chosen who knows on what basis to define democracy and gets - unsurprisingly - a wild range of a few good and mostly ill-informed answers. It kept showing us scenes of modern Athens, together with ancient ruins of the Parthenon, with captions from Plato while sidestepping the central question about why he himself would have opposed democracy. If this was supposed to be an argument in favor of an anarchist form of direct democracy, then it failed because it never made that argument explicitly, let alone compellingly. If this was supposed to be a critique of capitalism, then it was a missed opportunity. By bouncing all over topics and places, it neglected to focus its fire in any sort of concerted fashion. In short, for all of the great cinematography, the film lacks depth and represents the most sloppy, ineffective kind of rhetorical attack on capitalism. In skilled, wiser hands this could have been an inspiring, thought-provoking manifesto. Alas...