 The strength of the film is its diverse cast and complex ideas about democracy, about our individual responsibilities, about the moral choices that we bear, and that our elected officials must themselves negotiate. Are they acting in their interest or our interest? Whatever happens here, the best of luck. You win. I support you fully. My name is Stephen Garza, and I'm running for governor. What happens when you bring together over a thousand teenage boys from Texas and ask them to go through a mock election? What can this experiment tell us about how the complex views of individuals get translated into politics? Is the electoral process more about tribal competition or actual policy preferences? Those are just some of the questions explored by the new film Boy State. Asked if the political views voiced in my speech. Sometimes you got to say what you got to say in an attempt to win. I think he's a fantastic politician, but I don't think a fantastic politician is a compliment either. Boy State is a program of the American Legion. There's a program for girls, too, called Girl State, and they're week-long annual civics camps held in the summer. In 2017, we read that the boys in Texas had voted to secede from the union. That provocative act got some attention and got our attention. We thought, what an interesting program because it actually brings together teenagers from all different political backgrounds, and they get together and they talk to each other and they run for office, they pass bills. What did you say? It's like the running of the bulls? It's like suddenly they're released into the yard, and as you see in the film, they start their signature gathering for who the people who want to become governor and sort of the alpha male business starts happening very quickly. It's a little early to start running for governor, don't you think? We don't even have a party formed yet. You don't have any support in the primaries. No, but if you have to start early, you have to start... You don't have to start this early. What do you believe in? My views will most likely align with the party for the majority of them. I want to hear an open debate. In other words, you're waiting for the party to come up with an opinion, and then you're going to go with the party. What do you stand for, though? You stand for freedom. You stand for freedom. It's a bold policy. The culmination of the event is the election of governor and then the lesser offices. The project is really to learn about the challenges of the electoral process and of representative democracy, not so much the challenges of then governing. It's interesting to me that the process of Boy State is set up in such a way to put people in parties immediately without knowing what their platform is, without knowing who their leader is, and then they figure out what the parties mean later. I'm wondering if you think that helps or hurts any parallels we might see in our current political environment. This is a question that we've wrestled with. Does the party structure, federalists versus nationalists immediately introduce a tribal competition and you see this literally chest beating, beat the federalists, beat the nationalists. Well, they don't stand for anything yet. What are you actually beating? But also as a mirror reflection of what actually happens in our country, there is two parties that rule the school. And I think to some degree the question here is can those two parties in their tribal spate, in their tribal face-off, have civil discourse? That's the whole idea is you are on opposite sides of, I mean, you know, I guess a sports analogy would be on the opposite end of the field. Can you still talk to each other? I will skip the part where I brag for three minutes about how great and cool I am, seeing as we are all qualified young men of skill and character. People like that stuff. People like that stuff a lot. Some people say they're a sports junkie. I say I'm a politics junkie. The heart of the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. I'm playing this like a game. I would like very much to win. I love it, boys. I love it. Where are you from? I come from a very modest family. I want to, of course, be the first one to graduate from high school. I'm a progressive person and I'm in a room full of mostly conservative people. Our masculinity shall not be infringed. I've never seen so many white people ever. I feel like everybody has a secret underlying need for bipartisanship. A message of unity as good as it sounds is not winning anyone any elections. I think regardless of where you come from on the political spectrum, I think you're going to find an entry point in this film and you're going to find, I think, in an unlikely place, I think a valuable perspective on where we're at as a country. There are a lot of questions that we leave to the audience. It's, I think, a complicated story. We have very diverse, complicated characters. I think in documentary we sometimes hunger for a certain binary truth. We all know that's really not reality. We want simplistic heroes and maybe we should expect more complicated ones. It was interesting to see, not so much in the party platforms, but amongst the boys collectively, certain issues, positions that sort of ran in ways that we wouldn't expect. They were as a whole much more tolerant, it seemed, of social issues than we imagine Texas teenage predominantly white conservative boys to be. They were not all predictable. I think maybe they're just modern 17-year-old boys. Did you walk away from this hopeful? I did. Did you? Oh, very much so. I mean, I love that it's honest and it was shocking and frightening and I saw some of the darker currents of our politics expressed by young men, which is alarming. I expect they would be expressed by young women too. I think it's no surprise, but I think that, and I don't agree with all of their politics, all these guys in the movie, but I really did, all of them was inspired by them. I am hopeful and it's nice to be hopeful in a dark moment.