FRONTRUNNER

“Vote for the mother,” the candidate shouts to the crowd in "FrontRunner," New View Films’s compelling cinéma-vérité documentary about Dr. Massouda Jalal, the woman pediatrician who dared to run for President of Afghanistan in 2004 against a field of seventeen men.

“We need to have the people vote freely,” Dr. Jalal explains to the camera. A thin sheen of perspiration covers her forehead and upper lip. The candidate wears no makeup. Her face, stolid and earnest, is framed by an embroidered blue veil. We see her every pore, every flaw. A fly lands on her head scarf.

The Jalal campaign was run on a shoestring. “FrontRunner" shows her volunteers standing in clogged Kabul traffic, handing flyers through open taxi windows to the men in the front seats and the pale-blue-burqa-clad women in the back. In a voice over, Dr. Jalal explains her vision for her war-torn country: “Development. Peace. A plentiful life for all the people.”

The film cuts to the inside of a ragtag station wagon. Dr. Jalal and her husband, Kabul University law professor Faizullah Jalal, are on their way to a campaign appearance. “We need to have the people vote freely,” says Professor Jalal, his wife’s campaign manager. He speaks of their three young children. The camera pans to the youngest, who cuddles and fidgets beside his mother. “We want to raise the children to be democratic,” Professor Jalal says. “Hassina and Husna are voting for their mother. Abdullah is voting for [Hamid] Karzai. ‘Good,’ I tell him. ‘You’re free to vote for Karzai.’”

Regardless of whether you hope to see Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, or Senator Obama in the White House on January 20, 2009, I hope you will have a chance to see “Frontrunner” during the remaining months of the US presidential election process. It may clarify your thinking of whom to support. And why.