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Zhang Yimou and his fellow members of the 5 Generation of Chinese Directors have given us such great films. Farewell My Concubine, Blue Kite, and the Emperor and the Assassin.

Personally I enjoy Yimou's films the best. Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Latern, and my favorite To Live. Yimou's films are powerful glimpses into Chinese culture and history. Yimou's directing and the acting of his muse Gong Li made these films so good.

Not One Less is one of his first films without Gong Li. In fact, I do not think any of the actors in the film are professionals. But that does not matter. Not One Less is one of the most powerful and moving films you will ever watch.

Not One Less is the story of rural China, poverty, and education. Without giving too much away NOt One Less is about a young girl who becomes a substitute teacher in a one room school house. She is told she will not get paid if any kids drop out. One kid does and this little girls goes across China to find her.

This movie is more than a story of China. It is a universal story of education, poverty, children, and hope.

I saw three great Chinese films this year: Emperor and the Assassin, King of Masks and Not One Less. I highly recommend all three. Emperor and the Assassin was a historical epic. King of Masks was a heartwarming period piece dealing with the role women and Not One Less.

This is a great film. I recommend getting this film.

The movie seems simple enough. A girl, really nothing more than an older student, is selected to watch over the school while the schoolmaster is away. The teacher is stubborn (if not too smart) and suggles to keep the class intact till the master comes back. When one boy, needing to make money for his family, goes to the big city the sub follows, to try to find him.
The cast is made up of normal people. The students are real students, the shop keepers are real shop keepers and the street bums, for all I know, are real street bums.
At first the film seemed slow. Sometimes the movie tried to be TOO clever and did things that I seemed to see coming a mile away. But it was a trick, like when the kids in Rome hold up a newspaper in front of your face while another tries to pickpocket you. The director is using what seems like formula scenes that any Hollywood hack could write while slowly weaving a truly emotional story that only hits you near the ending. Maybe it is because the cast are NOT actors, or the actions taken by the cast seemed so normal, or the scenes of street life were so REAL. By the end of the movie, when the teacher was on TV asking for the boy to come home, I found myself crying. THAT is not the norm for me.
The movie is like a mass-produced car that some artist has worked on. Outside it seems plain but on the inside it has real power. In some ways more powerful than 'The Road Home'.

I have yet to see all of Zhang Yimou's films, but I am beginning to suspect he must be considered among the greatest of all film directors -- ever.

I am sympathetic to the tremendous challenge of making a living by having to continuously churn out creative material, but how some of this man's films compare with other modern fare is absolutely stunning. How this man makes such evocotive films with so little resources can only be fully appreciated when one considers so many other films made with infinite resources that are utterly bereft. If this is not proof of genius in his field, I don't know what might be.

When I first starting watching Zhang's films I became charmed by the lack of predictability. I found myself thinking: Now if this were an American film, this would happen. But something different usually happens -- something so true to life that you become involved with the characters of the story on a deep and satisfying level. I hope he can resist the temptation to immitate his Western peers -- it is they who should immitate him.

This very simply told tale has a large message that I think Zhang wants to tell about his homeland.

In Maoist times, the Chinese people were strongly persuaded that the ideal countryman was a souless, thoughtless, slogan-chanting, agrarian worker who bred the next generation of obeying automatons. The characters of this story are those whose lot in life is to endure the system that regime had wrought, and when our 13 year old heroine journeys to the city, her goal is to retrieve the missing boy for her own narrow purposes.

However, when she is interviewed on television, her humanity, in spite of herself, comes forth. Furthermore, the spontaneity of her emotions touches the local viewers in a way that shows China is a land where the oppressors failed to extract the souls from their subjects.

If you have kindness and caring in your soul (of course you do) you will connect with this movie. If you are also new to Chinese film, you will begin to question what you thought made a worthwhile film.

Zhang Yimou is a genius. Watch this movie.

If you have a heart it will break. If you have eyes, they will cry as your chest is heaving. If you have a mind it will work to make sense of the seeming contradictions that our cultural bias creates; but once you've figured it out your heart will be filled with love and admiration for the young teacher who, in Chinese tradition, devotes herself completely to her students. Your eyes will see through the veil of culture and in ways that others cannot to an understanding that these countryside people are not poor; but rich in ways that we in the west are starving for. There is true meaning and devotion in their daily life, and a connectedness to people that is deep and profound.

This is one of the foreign films that reconnects me with the years that I spent in China and the love and gratitude that I hold for my many Chinese friends. The story may seem hard to believe; but all of the situations and behaviors depicted are very much within the enduring traditional cultural pattern that exists in China today. "If you are my teacher for one day; you are my teacher for life." Watch and learn. Watch and love.

Cannes International Film Festival snubbed the film because they thought it was Chinese Communist propanda. The Chinese authorities loved the film because they thought the same, all because of the ending.

Nobody seems to realize just how profoundly wrong that opinion is.

The government and society failed these children, their school and frankly all the people living in the rural areas. The enormous gap of wealth between the city dwellers and peasants is obscene.

Early in the movie, the children sing songs of praise to Mao Zhe Dong and the Communisty party, while the viewer is in full view of their abject poverty and abandonment. Is this in praise of the Communists and Mao's vision or against it?

This film also criticizes how the cities (government and people)ignore their poor.

During the travels through the city, neither the peasant teacher nor the student she is searching for recieves any "free" help from the city dwellers. Nobody blinks an eye at the fact that young peasant children wandering alone in the City, trying to survive on what amounts to a 0.25 cents a day. At most, some people give advice, but never time or money. There are no free bowls of noodles, you will understand when you see the film.

Only when a TV Station manager helps do the kids find relief. Even this help is motivated by a combination of generosity, and desire for good TV material.

This is a very subtle yet loud social criticism. The director should be praised for this profound piece of art.

Zhang Yimou lifts the vail and provides a wonderous glimpse into life in rural China. The movie tells the story of a young girl who must take over a small rural school while the regular teacher goes away to take care of family matters. If upon the return of the teacher there is "Not One Less" student, she will be paid, but if she looses any of her pupils, the money she so desperately needs will be forfeit. She is soon tested as she finds students are torn between going to school and obligations to help their families tend the land. The young girl, Wei Minzeh, who has no previous acting experience is stunningly sweet, incredibly determined, and savy. It is hard to imagine why she was not nominated for Best Actress. The Director did much more than expose life in China to the outsiders view, he showed the universality of human traits such as indifference, bureaucratic thinking and finally compassion. Ulitimately one realizes that this movie could have just as easily been filmed in West Virginia, Maine or the farmlands of California.

My daughter was adopted from rural China as a baby and brought to New York, where she enjoys access to the goods and services available at the upper end of the capitalist food chain. Except for the happy accident of her adoption (the luck is mostly ours), she would have ended up as one of the impoverished country schoolchildren captured in this moving film. Zhang Yimou's movie is an eye-opening look at the people who have been left in the dust while China's economic engine roars forward. Shot mostly with an amateur cast, and using a happy-ending story line that allows him to dance around Party censors, Zhang still manages to make an artful social protest.

The story unfolds simply. Teacher Gao is forced leave the village school to take care of his sick mother, and the only substitute available is Wei, a 13 year old girl. Barely educated herself, Wei takes the job because she needs the money. She'll be paid 50 yuan for a month's work and receive a 10 yuan bonus if all the children are still at school when Gao returns. To put these sums in context, 10 yuan is about one dollar and twenty five cents in American money.

Because his family is out of money, one of Wei's rowdier students runs away to the city to find work. Wanting her 10 yuan bonus, Wei decides to find him and bring him back. She enlists her remaining students to help raise bus fare, and in these scenes we see with stark clarity how poor these villagers are. A can of Coke must be shared by half the class. Even after the class spends a day hauling bricks, they aren't even close to earning a bus ticket to the city. Wei ends up hitching a ride to find her ten year old lost sheep.

Once in the city, Wei and her runaway pupil seem like figures out of Dickens or The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's expose of early American capitalism. The lost children are bewildered, overwhelmed and victimized, rescued only by improbable acts of kindness. In a fairy tale twist, a kindly television station manager reunites Wei and her lost pupil and brings them back to the village in buses laden with gifts and supplies. Of course, the station manager is clever enough to realize that Wei's story makes good TV, and that's one of Zhang's main points: when money's involved, no one's motives are pure.

By the story's end, we understand that when the buses from the city depart, these kids, despite their spunk, will still be mired in grinding, hopeless poverty. Capitalism may be the most efficient wealth creation system ever devised, but China is learning, as England and America did, that it produces victims as surely as it produces wealth. Zhang's achievement is to make us see the victims in all their grace, pathos and particularity.

This is NOT a political protest film, despite the tendency of some people to politicize every major piece of contemporary Chinese film-making. If this film has a political over-tone at all, it would be to serve as a propaganda piece for the government-sponsored Hope Project, a massive fund-raising campaign to benefit rural education. Rural education is in fact one of the bright spots of the Communist record, considering that prior to the Communist take-over the vast majority of rural China was illiterate, and efforts to promote literacy (even those sponsored by Christian missionaries) were violently opposed by the traditional gentry. But of course, all that was too much Chinese history to expect from people who insist on referring to the director as "Yimou", when his family name is Zhang. We do not refer to Mao Zedong as Zedong.

I probably don't need to rehash the basic story of the film or to point out yet again that the director casted local non-actors for every major role in the film. The result is a film that has the look and feel of a docudrama. But despite the somewhat awkward acting, all of the characters are entirely believable. While the story line is certainly somewhat contrived, the film was peppered with enough believable details to maintain the viewer's suspension of disbelief. And it's these seemingly trivial details that will move you, sometimes deeply.

The problems exposed by the film are the universal problems of poverty. Even if China were to become democratic in the US model tomorrow, all these problems will remain for some years to come and may in fact exacerbate in the short run. Watch the film, and try not to squander the good fortune you enjoy.

Recently I returned from a visit to a rural school in Shanxi Province, in north central China which has much of the same makings as the one depicted in this film. Zhang has once again turned his lense onto an overlooked aspect of Chinese society. This film was well received by Beijing's expat community (judging by the turnout for its English language premiere) and it was no less a success with Chinese audiences, an important consideration. While Zhang is not as highly acclaimed by many of his countrymen (a fact often overlooked in the West), he does produce a believable effort here. It is worth noting that Zhang was accused of somehow toeing the government line when he made this film but that is both wrong and patronizing. Indeed, Zhang was indignant that so many "supporters" in the West (i.e. at the Cannes Film Festival) raised suspicions about his motives that he withdrew it and another fine film, "The Road Home," from the competition. If you aren't one of those Westerners who has succumbed to the simplistic binary thinking of East vs. West, of Good China and Bad China, etc., than get this film. It will touch your heartstrings and pluck them again in years to come.

What a great movie! It's a tearjerker, so be prepared, but it is not manipulative -- it tells a simple, true, story in minimalist fashion, letting the characters and events speak for themselves. The determination of the heroine to find her missing student is breathtaking, the poverty is heartbreaking, and the children in her class are genuine and adorable. Take a break from big-budget garbage and see this movie soon.