Yesterday we attended the press preview for next month’s 5th annual SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival and got a sneak peak at a few of the documentary films that will be making their Washington area (and in some cases World or North American) premieres at the Silver Spring festival in June. DCist will be covering the festival once again this year, but in the meantime we thought we’d share a handful of the 100 announced titles that we’re most interested in checking out based on what we saw yesterday. You can browse the full line-up (be warned, it’s 13 pages long) in pdf form here.

Please Vote for Me is Weijun Chen’s adorable-looking story of democracy in action in China, in the form of an election for a 3rd grade class monitor in Wehun Province. Sure to please fans of Kids Do the Darndest Things and followers of international politics alike.

Enemies of Happiness has been making the major festival rounds this year, stopping at Hot Docs in Toronto last month and picking up the World Cinema Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance. Eva Mulvad’s film follows 27-year-old Malalai Joya as she runs for a seat in parliament in Afghanistan in 2005.

Doug Pray’s Big Rig takes us inside the largely unseen world of America’s truckdrivers. The people who choose this lifestyle are quirky, to be sure, but are their stories of struggling for a life of independence emblematic of the spirit of the United States?

Director Rob VanAlkemade brings the fight against shopping to the big screen, as the singular Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir head to Disneyland to preach against overspending in What Would Jesus Buy?. Rev. Billy looks set to appear in person at the festival as well.

Frederick Wiseman isn’t known for making tightly packaged films — instead, they tend to be many hours long, but leave no stone unturned. Wiseman has turned his eye on politics at the state level this time in State Legislature, exposing it as the place where the weirdest, but most germane to our lives, politics really happens.

Expect more on SILVERDOCS from us over the next month. The Festival runs June 12-17 at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Silver Spring.

Filed Under: afi silver, afi silver theater, afisilvertheater, america, china, cinema, Cultural Center, dcist, discovery, discovery channel, Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, election, film, hot, Hot Docs, international, jesus, kids, media, movies, North American, people, politics, shopping, silver spring, SILVERDOCS AFI, spring, State Legislature, Stop Shopping, Sundance, The Festival, theater, toronto, united states, washington, What Would Jesus Buy,