DEAR OPRAH – NON-VOTING AMERICA’S WILDEST DREAM

Speciality Cinema, tonight, 9.15 p.m.

Why don't 100 million potential voters bother casting a ballot in America's election? That is the question at the heart of 'Dear Oprah – Non-Voting America's Wildest Dream'.

It's one well worthy of asking and it takes the Dutch film-makers across the States, chatting with ordinary voters a year before last November's presidential election.

It makes some interesting observations although the folksy style can be a bit irritating.

The narrator Kasper Verkaik, who travels around in a malfunctioning camper van he's dubbed Lucy, is on his first trip to the States but he sounds more typically American than some of those he meets.

For some reason he arrives having already perfected a sort of Garrison Keillor-type slow drawl and uses it to give us unnecessary updates on his failing transport.

The first section is the worst – where he has a succession of cheap dinner dates with various politicos and uses various pies and pizzas to demonstrate the proportion of voters not participating.

A bigger turn-out would signal a shift to the left he reasons as the political road movie gets underway in earnest and noticeably improves.

The team visits a single mom in Ohio who reels off tails of six-hour waits at polling booths – only to be told she can't take her three-year-old daughter in with her in case she influences the process.

There's a trip to a barber shop in South Carolina and visits to a mother in New Orleans who recounts being held a gun-point, wives separated from husbands, by authorities who did less to help than Oprah – about the only person she is now willing to vote for. Only she's not running.

It's moving stuff but doesn't really answer the question why people don't vote – nor can it as the reasons must be so numerous.

One sports fan, pigeonholed outside a football game where tailgate parties are in full flow, offers the opinion that "Americans are just too fat, dumb and happy" to care. Oh dear, this is what we had feared.

But it does throw some interesting light on the Democratic party machinery, being expertly worked by the up and coming Barack Obama.

Obama fans will lap up footage of him speaking to modest crowds at the beginning of the primaries, putting in the effort which paid off so spectacularly last November when a record voter turn-out swept him into office. A story with a happy ending?

Yes, if you forget that even then nearly 40 percent of voters still didn't vote. But it's a start.

The film also makes some telling points about celebrities who seem to have more public support than most politicians and even points out the vast power Oprah's endorsement had in getting Obama in the White House.

As one student puts it: "You listen to your mom and your mom listens to Oprah."

But who is listening to the poor and marginalised non-voters? That will be the biggest test of Obama's presidency.