This article uses the 'students as partners' framework to examine the implications of an action research project conducted as part of a film studies module, delivered at a transnational tertiary education provider, a Sino-British university in China. The action research project consisted of the implementation of a system of film nomination and voting that allowed students to actively participate in one element of the syllabus design, namely, the choice of films to be screened and discussed in a segment of the module's curriculum, spanning 3 out of the total 14 weeks of the semester. Using as a dataset a series of semi-structured interviews with students who participated in the project, the article analyses their attitudes towards the process of nomination and voting, and points to future directions of research. By focusing on the intended democratic stakes of the project, the article argues that although the students evidenced some of the expected benefits of the collaboration, they also discursively privileged the role, the experience and the perspective of the teacher over their own.