Beijing officials put money into this eyeopening Chinese film directed by Zhang (Raise the Red Lantern) Yimou. Then some bureaucrat got cold feet. It has been shown in the West, but publicly disapproved of back home. Despite which, it won the Golden Lion principal prize at Venice last year. More recently, at Cannes, I served on the nine-person jury under Michel Ciment that awarded it the Unesco prize for exemplifying human values. I got the feeling that Unesco, a diplomatic body rather than a dispassionate judge, was more embarrassed than enthusiastic by the way our votes went.
Well, whether this further offends the Chinese or not, it is all to the credit of an immensely human film about a fill-in teacher in rural China, a pathetically educated 13-year-old girl, placed in charge of pupils hardly younger. Undaunted, she sets out for the big city to retrieve a truant. Comic and touching by turns, it's a totally accessible, warmly affectionate film that summarises the tremendous thirst for knowledge in China and also implicitly indicts the wasteful educational resources that we in the West lavish on our own all too often ungrateful and ill-educated children.
Not One Less (Yi Ge Dou Bu Neng Shao)
Cert: U
