In a village in China mired in poverty, Gao (Gao Enman) is the lone teacher in a school so threadbare he must ration chalk to make sure he has enough for the day. The destitution of the village is not limited to the school; some of the children sleep in the schoolhouse because they have nowhere else to go, and many students have already dropped out to go to work to help feed their families. Gao is forced to leave town for a month, and no one in the village is able to take over for him except a
13-year-old girl, Wei Minzhi (Wei Minzhi), who possesses only the most rudimentary education herself. What she lacks in educational credential, she makes up for in determination -- she needs money, and teaching is an honest job that pays, and since she'll get a 10 yuan bonus if all 28 students are still attending when Gao gets back, she is determined that no one will drop out on her watch. So when one student turns up missing, and word has it he's been sent to the city by his mother to work, she travels to the city to look for him. In a place where thousands of children are working in the underground labor force or begging on the street, one boy hardly stands out from the crowd, and she has little luck. However, she's able to persuade a sympathetic TV station manager to let her make an announcement in hopes someone knows where he has gone. Despite its serious and often grim theme, Yi Ge Dou Bu Neng Shao is often light in tone and draws on the strength and humor of its characters; the film won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
For Chinese viewers, this film will play as a human drama. For Western viewers, there's almost equal interest at the edges of the screen, in the background, in the locations and incidental details that show daily life in today's China.
This alternately sad-funny film sneaks up on you. Its ability to grab us is surprising because it does so little, because it's so spare -- so unadorned and unpretentious.
Do you have a heart that beats inside your body? If you do, then you will like this film. It starts out a little slow, but gets better in the middle and ends with a powerful climax. Yimou Zhang direction is perfect. He just simply tells the story, and it looks great. There is no ego, or fancy editing. The kids in this
film are about the cutest things I've ever seen, and are very true to life. In fact, all of this film is very true to life......and like life, it can be beautiful and sad at the same time.
a 13 year old substitute teacher for a very poor village school, goes to the big city to look for one of her students, they experience lonliness, begging for food. good movie, rent it!
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