DVD: "Not One Less" (一个都不能少) (1999)
We're about to watch this movie in zonghe class. I've seen it before but am happy to watch it again. I thought I'd write up my thoughts on it since it's such a gorgeous little gem of a movie.
The storyline is a simple and heartwarming story which draws attention to the plight of conditions of children in rural China who have little access to education and are without schoolbooks or even teachers.... It's a 'human interest' story of the most fundamental. It's shot documentary style - a glimpse into the life of children in rural China. It definitely won't be for everyone. There's no drama, romance or special effects here but I really like this movie.
Teacher Gao is a teacher in a primary school in the remote Chinese countryside. The village is called Shuiquan but it could be any peasant village anywhere in China. His mother is gravely ill and he must leave the school for month to tend to her. The mayor of Shuiquan Village finds a substitute teacher named Wei Minzhi to take classes for one month.
When Teacher Gao sees that Wei Minzhi is only 13 years old, he opposes the appointment given that she is only a child herself.
He knows that she will not be able to teach students who are only slightly younger than she is. In the end, Teacher Gao has no choice. The mayor is unable to find anyone else in the area prepared to take on the job and at the very least she can keep an eye on the children while Teacher Gao is away.
Wei Minzhi is told that the class originally had 40 students at the start of the school year. Now there are only 28 students. This is a common in problem in China that is referred to in almost all of our classes. A tragically large number of children in China are unable to get a basic education due to poverty and there is even a specific phrase in Chinese for this.
It's called 失学shīxué. It literally means 'lose study' but the definition is:
① be deprived of education
② have to discontinue one's study
My dictionary's sample sentence is: "Many children are deprived of education due to their families' poverty". Hence there are foundations like the Hope Foundation (Wish Foundation) which try to help children in rural areas finish primary school at the very least.
Teacher Gao tells Wei Minzhi that she must not allow 'even one' more student to drop out while he’s away. In Chinese the movie is called: "一个都不能少" which translates as - 'cannot be less even by one'. She is promised an additional RMB10 if she is able to maintain student numbers.
Her students are a motley bunch of children, grubby, cheeky and unmanageable.
Wei Minzhi calls the roll every day and her classes consist of making the students copy lessons off the blackboard. Chalk is also a limited resource and she only has one piece of chalk a day - enough to copy one lesson onto the board each day. The children then copy the text into their own books.
The classroom is impoverished beyond belief. There is no clock, the passing of time is measured by the sunlight against a nail on a post. The teacher's desk appears to be missing one leg.
What's rather endearing is that there is no attempt to gloss over Wei Minzhi's limitations as a teacher. She doesn't appear to care whether her students study or not. She herself is a child and she just puts them in the classroom and spends most of her sitting outside on the doorstep while they copy down the notes.
She realises that retaining the students is not an easy task. Her first loss is when one student is recruited to go to a special sports school. The child who most challenges Wei Minzhi's already shaky authority is a very naughty and cheeky 10 year old named Zhang Huike. One morning, however, he fails to appear in class and Wei Minzhi discovers that because his family are in serious financial debt, he has been compelled to go to the city to find work. At this point, Wei Minzhi and the students make plans to raise money to go to the city to find Zhang and bring him back to school.
Wei Minzhi heads off to the 'big city', which is probably 'tiny' by Chinese standards. Her aim is to find him in the sea of people and bring him back. The phrase in Chinese is looking for him in the "茫人海" - the 'vast sea of people'.
Zhang Huike has become another lost soul in the city. He lives on the streets, scavenging for food. What follows is Wei Minzhi's touching search for this young boy, on the streets, in the bus station .....
As I said, this is a simple story. It is specifically about economic conditions in rural China. There's nothing glitzy or glamorous about it. It's heart-warming and heart-breaking at the same time. It touches me deeply simply because for me, a basic education should be a right not a privilege and seeing little kids in China struggle to get an education really bothers me.
Even more startling? Wei Minzhi and Zhang Huike play themselves. They're not real actors. They're just two peasant kids that Zhang Yi Mou the director plucked out of obscurity and put in front of a camera. Their performances are even more amazing for that reason.
Here is an extract of the article at TIMEasia.com called "The Kids are All Right":
The Kids Are All Right: Zhang Yimou says working with young amateur actors suits him perfectly
Chinese director Zhang Yimou met with TIME reporter Stephen Short in Hong Kong during a promotional tour for his latest work, Not One Less. The film, starring amateur child actors, won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival.
TIME: Where is the title Not One Less from?
Zhang: I wanted to make a film about love and caring. I think there's not enough of that in contemporary China. I think it's vital that people have these basic things in their nature and can show them and share them with others.
TIME: Is the film political?
Zhang: No. Not One Less is really a very simple film about love.
TIME: Was it difficult working with children?
Zhang: Working with the children was the hardest thing I've ever done in my career. Everyone always says never work with children or animals and now I realize why.
TIME: Had any of the children acted before?
Zhang: Nobody had. We auditioned about 4,000 children the length and breadth of China for six months before finding our two lead actors Wei Minzhi [who plays the substitute teacher] and Zhang Huike [who plays one of her students]. There was actually another girl we chose over Wei Minzhi, but then we took her and Wei to Beijing, stood them in the middle of a busy street and asked them to scream at the top of their lungs. The girl I originally wanted couldn't do that, but Wei stood there and belted her lungs out. She was incredible.
TIME: How did you get the children to act?
Zhang: During shooting you have to make children think the whole thing is real, so we never showed them the script. You can't give any hints about what you're going to shoot, otherwise the kids will all go away at the end of the day and imitate TV characters the next day. We would end up playing lots of games with them. We often took 20 or 30 takes, sometimes 70 to 80. There was no rehearsal of any scene.
TIME: You must have felt like father and mother to them all.
Zhang: Yes I did. I had to be incredibly patient and tell them off quite a lot. Wei Minzhi said that I was very strict.
TIME: And were you?
Zhang: I had to be sometimes. If I hadn't been strict it would have been even more frustrating.
TIME: The adults were nonprofessionals too, right?
Zhang: Almost all the adults were playing the roles they play every day in real life. The mayor, Tian Zhenda, has been a mayor in a rural town for 14 years. He turned out to be very funny. He was the exception. There's one scene involving a concierge at a TV station. The woman who we used in the movie has been concierge at the station for 30 years. Every time I said shoot, she'd clam up and wouldn't speak. In the end I grabbed a bystander and told the concierge that if she didn't speak when we started the scene again, I would replace her. So when the second candidate came to try, suddenly the concierge was terrific.
TIME: Since few of the actors knew anything about the movie world, you probably had more leeway in what you could make them do.
Zhang: That's true. We have a saying in Chinese: it's easy to see the pit of hell, but difficult to deal with its little ghosts. Amateur actors were perfect for me. I could chose one but have a standby waiting, so we could always change them if we wanted to. That was very unusual.
TIME: Did you pay the children?
Zhang: Yes, the children got around $600 each.
TIME: That's a small fortune in rural China.
Zhang: Yes, it's totally changed their lives.
TIME: Has that been a good thing?
Zhang: Very. Wei Minzhi has been doing commercials for tea. She wears exactly the same clothes she wore on the movie and of course she gets paid for those.
TIME: They're all still in school?
Zhang: Yes, Wei is at high school. But it's funny: in the film Zhang plays a character much younger than Wei's, but in real life, he is one year older than her. He's still at junior school. So on the set, he kept taunting her and fooling around with her because he's actually older. He keeps failing his exams, so he's stayed behind to keep retaking them. But he wrote me a letter a few weeks ago saying he's now passed and is going to high school next year as well. They were fighting each other in real life and as actors all the time and I think that helped a lot of the scenes in the movie. He was still fighting with her during the promotion in China.
TIME: Will you work with them again?
Zhang: Zhang Huike was superb. During that promotion in China, all the audiences were crazy about him. I regretted a little that I didn't shoot more scenes with him. He's very smart for a boy who's still in junior high school.
TIME: What's your next film about?
Zhang: It will be modern, very modern, set in a Chinese city like Beijing or Shanghai and will be about people being alone. People who have become alienated, people who are searching for love.
Not One Less was released in the United States by Sony Pictures. I bought my dvd copy ages ago here off amazon.com. If anyone else has seen it, I'd love to read your thoughts!
Links
The storyline is a simple and heartwarming story which draws attention to the plight of conditions of children in rural China who have little access to education and are without schoolbooks or even teachers.... It's a 'human interest' story of the most fundamental. It's shot documentary style - a glimpse into the life of children in rural China. It definitely won't be for everyone. There's no drama, romance or special effects here but I really like this movie.
Teacher Gao is a teacher in a primary school in the remote Chinese countryside. The village is called Shuiquan but it could be any peasant village anywhere in China. His mother is gravely ill and he must leave the school for month to tend to her. The mayor of Shuiquan Village finds a substitute teacher named Wei Minzhi to take classes for one month.
When Teacher Gao sees that Wei Minzhi is only 13 years old, he opposes the appointment given that she is only a child herself.
He knows that she will not be able to teach students who are only slightly younger than she is. In the end, Teacher Gao has no choice. The mayor is unable to find anyone else in the area prepared to take on the job and at the very least she can keep an eye on the children while Teacher Gao is away.
Wei Minzhi is told that the class originally had 40 students at the start of the school year. Now there are only 28 students. This is a common in problem in China that is referred to in almost all of our classes. A tragically large number of children in China are unable to get a basic education due to poverty and there is even a specific phrase in Chinese for this.
It's called 失学shīxué. It literally means 'lose study' but the definition is:
① be deprived of education
② have to discontinue one's study
My dictionary's sample sentence is: "Many children are deprived of education due to their families' poverty". Hence there are foundations like the Hope Foundation (Wish Foundation) which try to help children in rural areas finish primary school at the very least.
Teacher Gao tells Wei Minzhi that she must not allow 'even one' more student to drop out while he’s away. In Chinese the movie is called: "一个都不能少" which translates as - 'cannot be less even by one'. She is promised an additional RMB10 if she is able to maintain student numbers.
Her students are a motley bunch of children, grubby, cheeky and unmanageable.
Wei Minzhi calls the roll every day and her classes consist of making the students copy lessons off the blackboard. Chalk is also a limited resource and she only has one piece of chalk a day - enough to copy one lesson onto the board each day. The children then copy the text into their own books.
The classroom is impoverished beyond belief. There is no clock, the passing of time is measured by the sunlight against a nail on a post. The teacher's desk appears to be missing one leg.
What's rather endearing is that there is no attempt to gloss over Wei Minzhi's limitations as a teacher. She doesn't appear to care whether her students study or not. She herself is a child and she just puts them in the classroom and spends most of her sitting outside on the doorstep while they copy down the notes.
She realises that retaining the students is not an easy task. Her first loss is when one student is recruited to go to a special sports school. The child who most challenges Wei Minzhi's already shaky authority is a very naughty and cheeky 10 year old named Zhang Huike. One morning, however, he fails to appear in class and Wei Minzhi discovers that because his family are in serious financial debt, he has been compelled to go to the city to find work. At this point, Wei Minzhi and the students make plans to raise money to go to the city to find Zhang and bring him back to school.
Wei Minzhi heads off to the 'big city', which is probably 'tiny' by Chinese standards. Her aim is to find him in the sea of people and bring him back. The phrase in Chinese is looking for him in the "茫人海" - the 'vast sea of people'.
Zhang Huike has become another lost soul in the city. He lives on the streets, scavenging for food. What follows is Wei Minzhi's touching search for this young boy, on the streets, in the bus station .....
As I said, this is a simple story. It is specifically about economic conditions in rural China. There's nothing glitzy or glamorous about it. It's heart-warming and heart-breaking at the same time. It touches me deeply simply because for me, a basic education should be a right not a privilege and seeing little kids in China struggle to get an education really bothers me.
Even more startling? Wei Minzhi and Zhang Huike play themselves. They're not real actors. They're just two peasant kids that Zhang Yi Mou the director plucked out of obscurity and put in front of a camera. Their performances are even more amazing for that reason.
Here is an extract of the article at TIMEasia.com called "The Kids are All Right":
The Kids Are All Right: Zhang Yimou says working with young amateur actors suits him perfectly
Chinese director Zhang Yimou met with TIME reporter Stephen Short in Hong Kong during a promotional tour for his latest work, Not One Less. The film, starring amateur child actors, won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival.
TIME: Where is the title Not One Less from?
Zhang: I wanted to make a film about love and caring. I think there's not enough of that in contemporary China. I think it's vital that people have these basic things in their nature and can show them and share them with others.
TIME: Is the film political?
Zhang: No. Not One Less is really a very simple film about love.
TIME: Was it difficult working with children?
Zhang: Working with the children was the hardest thing I've ever done in my career. Everyone always says never work with children or animals and now I realize why.
TIME: Had any of the children acted before?
Zhang: Nobody had. We auditioned about 4,000 children the length and breadth of China for six months before finding our two lead actors Wei Minzhi [who plays the substitute teacher] and Zhang Huike [who plays one of her students]. There was actually another girl we chose over Wei Minzhi, but then we took her and Wei to Beijing, stood them in the middle of a busy street and asked them to scream at the top of their lungs. The girl I originally wanted couldn't do that, but Wei stood there and belted her lungs out. She was incredible.
TIME: How did you get the children to act?
Zhang: During shooting you have to make children think the whole thing is real, so we never showed them the script. You can't give any hints about what you're going to shoot, otherwise the kids will all go away at the end of the day and imitate TV characters the next day. We would end up playing lots of games with them. We often took 20 or 30 takes, sometimes 70 to 80. There was no rehearsal of any scene.
TIME: You must have felt like father and mother to them all.
Zhang: Yes I did. I had to be incredibly patient and tell them off quite a lot. Wei Minzhi said that I was very strict.
TIME: And were you?
Zhang: I had to be sometimes. If I hadn't been strict it would have been even more frustrating.
TIME: The adults were nonprofessionals too, right?
Zhang: Almost all the adults were playing the roles they play every day in real life. The mayor, Tian Zhenda, has been a mayor in a rural town for 14 years. He turned out to be very funny. He was the exception. There's one scene involving a concierge at a TV station. The woman who we used in the movie has been concierge at the station for 30 years. Every time I said shoot, she'd clam up and wouldn't speak. In the end I grabbed a bystander and told the concierge that if she didn't speak when we started the scene again, I would replace her. So when the second candidate came to try, suddenly the concierge was terrific.
TIME: Since few of the actors knew anything about the movie world, you probably had more leeway in what you could make them do.
Zhang: That's true. We have a saying in Chinese: it's easy to see the pit of hell, but difficult to deal with its little ghosts. Amateur actors were perfect for me. I could chose one but have a standby waiting, so we could always change them if we wanted to. That was very unusual.
TIME: Did you pay the children?
Zhang: Yes, the children got around $600 each.
TIME: That's a small fortune in rural China.
Zhang: Yes, it's totally changed their lives.
TIME: Has that been a good thing?
Zhang: Very. Wei Minzhi has been doing commercials for tea. She wears exactly the same clothes she wore on the movie and of course she gets paid for those.
TIME: They're all still in school?
Zhang: Yes, Wei is at high school. But it's funny: in the film Zhang plays a character much younger than Wei's, but in real life, he is one year older than her. He's still at junior school. So on the set, he kept taunting her and fooling around with her because he's actually older. He keeps failing his exams, so he's stayed behind to keep retaking them. But he wrote me a letter a few weeks ago saying he's now passed and is going to high school next year as well. They were fighting each other in real life and as actors all the time and I think that helped a lot of the scenes in the movie. He was still fighting with her during the promotion in China.
TIME: Will you work with them again?
Zhang: Zhang Huike was superb. During that promotion in China, all the audiences were crazy about him. I regretted a little that I didn't shoot more scenes with him. He's very smart for a boy who's still in junior high school.
TIME: What's your next film about?
Zhang: It will be modern, very modern, set in a Chinese city like Beijing or Shanghai and will be about people being alone. People who have become alienated, people who are searching for love.
Not One Less was released in the United States by Sony Pictures. I bought my dvd copy ages ago here off amazon.com. If anyone else has seen it, I'd love to read your thoughts!
Links
- Review at salon.com
- The harsh reality of the Asian economic "miracle" in a Chinese province
- Article at TIMEasia.com
- Review at Pop Matters (negative review :) See I'm even-handed. This movie is not for everyone!
- Review at Culturevulture.net
- Rotten Tomatoes page
- Review at abc.net.au
- Wikipedia article
- Time Magazine review