Election Day

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Katy Chevigny in person

Presented in partnership with the Painted Bride Art Center and Black Youth Vote

Forget the pie charts, color-coded maps and hyperventilating pundits. What's the street-level experience of voters in today's America? Election Day (USA, 2007, 80 min) combines 11 stories — shot simultaneously on November 2, 2004 — into one. Award-winning director Katy Chevigny fielded 14 film crews to capture the action vérité-style from urban centers to an Indian Reservation to small towns across the country. It is as fast-paced and suspenseful as a thriller with the heroes being ordinary Americans determined to vote, to turn out others to vote, and to see that the process is legally and fairly done.

As Americans prepare to go to the polls again, Election Day offers a vivid, expansive and sometimes unsettling account of the last presidential election, when America's voting practices, once taken for granted, came under new and intense observation and challenge.

WATCH THE TRAILER

"I would love to see more Americans interested in trying to improve the electoral system. If we were to pressure our political leaders to pay some real attention to this, we could see some changes." —Katy Chevigny

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Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Independence Foundation.

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Katy Chevigny is the founder and executive director of the non-profit media company Arts Engine which fosters the production independent media and connects media makers and active audiences in order to spur critical consideration of pressing social issues. She co-directed Deadline (2004), an Emmy-nominated documentary about the dramatic events that took place in Illinois in 2003 concerning capital punishment. She is currently producing The Dishes, about bare-knuckle band-making in Chicago, and has produced many award-winning documentaries at Arts Engine, including: Arctic Son, Nuyorican Dream, Innocent Until Proven Guilty and Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption Today.