REVIEW

Not One Less is a touching film that calls for some reflection in order to appreciate the nature and plight of a fair number of school children in China's countryside today. For Y50 ($US6) thirteen-year-old Wei Minzhi is hired to keep thirty-odd kids in school for a month while the old village teacher takes leave to visit his ailing mother. Wei herself has just finished grade school and has no idea how to teach. All her thoughts are on getting paid, and when she suspects that she might not be, she chases after the village head and old teacher demanding payment. The two promise to pay her after thirty days, and if no more school kids drop out of school, Wei will get an extra ten yuan bonus. It is this added 'bonus' sum that gives Wei focus. She will make sure that there will be "not one less." Wei soon learns that her students pay no heed to a young girl who simply writes something on the blackboard and then sits outside guarding the door. She learns from the class monitor, four years her junior, to treasure the simple white chalk sticks-the instruments of education. Slowly, she begins to win respect. Having been schooled on what is expected of a teacher, Wei leads the class in tackling the matter of recovering the ten-year-old class imp, Zhang Huike, who has just dropped out of school. Zhang goes to the city to make some money to help his widowed mother. This is when the math lessons begin for the students-and the audience-as Wei and her charges try to calculate how much money it will take to go the big city and bring him back. While the students get their figures right and manage to raise the cash, it turns out that their cost estimates are wrong. Wei calculates they have a surplus of Y6 so she leads them to the village store where they share two cans of Coke-the new flavor of things. The next day they find out they are short over Y40 for the costs of the bus tickets to the city. Via determination, Wei makes it to the big city. Once there, her pertinacity wins out when, three days later, the local TV station broadcasts Wei's tearful plea for Zhang to home. A kindly food stall proprietress sees the program and realizes that the street urchin she has been feeding the last few days is the one Wei is looking for. This human interest story not only strikes a chord at the TV station and in the food stalls around the train station but touches the hearts of the big city folk as well, and money pours in to buy books and school supplies for the village school. Wei and Zhang accompany these tools of education back to the village. The film ends with teacher Wei and her students writing Chinese characters on blackboard in colored chalk. It is fortunate that Wei and Zhang get back to the village because neither is able to make a go of it in the city-both are penniless and reduced to scrounging for meals within a day of their arrival. Simply put, both of them need more education, and that is the message director Zhang Yimou wishes to convey. Zhang made this movie to bring attention to the plight of the children in the countryside who drop out of school and thus are ill-equipped to deal with challenges and opportunities present in China today. Profits made from this film go to "Project Hope," the national and international campaign to channel funds into the poor countryside areas to build schools, buy books, and champion children's education. This is truly a worthy cause, and when Not One Less premiered in the major cities of China, money poured in for Project Hope. Poverty in rural China is real, but it is not uniform nor does it afflict the majority of the people living on the land. In Shuichuan,* the village where the film was shot, the poverty of the schooling situation is relative. The brief glimpses of this village suggest that folks there are getting by well enough to build new brick houses, go and come from the city on the bus, and buy Coke regularly. However, now that the government has backed away from directing the local economy, there is no system in place to channel household wealth into public projects such as local schools. Had the film been set in a mountain village of Shanxi or Guizhou, where there are no new homes, buses, or Cokes, the tragedy of the situation would probably have been overwhelming. Whatever the merits of the Shuichuan setting, the players are genuine and real. The cast comes from the towns and villages in Hebei, where the film was shot. Wei, the village head, the old school master, the head of the TV station, the obtuse gate guard in the city, and the village kids all more or less play the roles they have in real life. Zhang's ability to guide this assemblage in acting out this simple tale gives Not One Less an authenticity that is rare in cinema today. This film will probably work best with a middle school audience. Younger school children may not be able to follow the story via the subtitles, while high school students might be looking for something with more action and romance. Middle school students would likely be fascinated by the differences they see, yet feel a link to Wei. There are a couple of caveats in order. To give students a better sense of the diverse realities of today's China, teachers should make other materials-film clips, photographs, and readings-describing grade school life in the big cities available as well, lest Not One Less become the sole source of mental images of what life is like for children in China. The film runs almost two hours, so it may take some imagination scheduling its screening. With these provisos in place, Not One Less has much to offer. *n the subtitles the village is misspelled "Shuixian." The film was filmed in Shuichuan in western Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing. A hour or so drive away from Shuichuan is Zhangjiakou, the big city in the film.