By the People

This painstaking electoral procedural follows unflappable Indiana county clerk Doris Anne Sadler, 11 days before the 2004 presidential debacle, as she nurses logistical calamities, plows through bureaucratic bullshit and makes do with an ever-dwindling supply of volunteer poll workers. There’s as little drama as you’d expect from so uncinematic a topic, yet Kris Lienert’s inquisitive camera and Malindi Fickle’s unerring sense of what to shoot make for a fascinating movie. Pulling elections off, it turns out, is akin to rolling water uphill; among this film’s many cynicism-puncturing points is that they happen at all. (Opens Fri; Village East.) — Mark Holcomb