"Not One Less"

"Not One Less"

"Not One Less" was released 1999. In an effort to prevent any students any students from leaving the school, the young character of Wei Minzhi embarks on a journey to retrieve one of her students in the film, Not One Less, directed by Zhang Yimou. In a rural village in China called Shuiquan during the 1990s, Wei is the only available substitute for teacher, Gao Enman, who must take a month’s leave to take care of family business. Being only 13 years old herself, Wei does not even have a high school education and so she is instructed to merely copy Gao’s texts on to the board and then make the students copy them into their notebooks, while only using one piece of chalk per day. Furthermore, she is instructed not to let any students leave the school until he returns by incentivizing her with a 10-yuan bonus. Unfortunately, one day Wei discovers that Zhang, the class troublemaker has left to the city of Zhangjiakou, in order to find work. Unperturbed in her decision to not lose any of the children, Wei raises money with the help of her remaining students and travels to Zhangjakou to find Zhang. While doing so, Wei incorporates math concepts in her teaching so that her students can apply them to figure out how much money needs to be raised for the bust tickets and the amount of time it will take. When she finally arrives to the city, Wei is unable to locate Zhang and seeks assistance from a television station manager so that she can broadcast a “missing person” ad. Wei ends up being on a talk show to feature the topic of rural education and luckily enough, Zhang sees it. Wei and Zhang are finally united and then return to their village with the help of the station manager with a truckload of school supplies donated by local viewers.

The film revolves around the difficulties in providing education in rural China. For example, in reference to Gao’s instruction to conserve chalk because the village simply cannot afford to purchase more, he standardized the size of written characters that Wei must copy onto the board. Wei also had to sleep in the shabby school building and share a bed with other female students. What’s more is that Gao hadn’t even been paid for the six months prior to Wei’s arrival. What struck me about the film was simply Wei’s unintentional perseverance. She obviously lacked money and, thus, any form of authority, yet she was able to overcome her barriers by her actions. In addition, I was reminded of the power of television through Wei’s eyes. I realized that once a person is on camera, she is automatically influencing people at mass, whether she has money or not and whether she wants to or not.