Not One Less

Not One Less (1999)

一个都不能少

In her village, she was the teacher. In the city, she discovered how much she had to learn.

Set in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s, the film centers on a 13-year-old substitute teacher, Wei Minzhi, in the Chinese countryside. Called in to substitute for a village teacher for one month, Wei is told not to lose any students.

Date of release
1999-10-30
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (203)
Runtime
1h 46m
Genres
Drama
Director
Zhang Yimou

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $592.6K
  • Awards: 3 · Nominations: 1. Including: Golden Lion; Hundred Flowers Award for Best Picture; Huabiao Award for Outstanding Film

Not One Less is a 1999 drama film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, adapted from Shi Xiangsheng's 1997 story A Sun in the Sky. It was produced by Guangxi Film Studio and released by China Film Group Corporation in mainland China, and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in North America and Columbia TriStar Film Distributors internationally.

Production and cast

Not One Less was Zhang Yimou's ninth film, but only the second not to star long-time collaborator Gong Li (the first was his 1997 Keep Cool). For this film, he cast only amateur actors whose real-life names and occupations resembled those of characters they played in the film—as The Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea described the performances, the actors are just "people playing variations of themselves in front of the camera".

The movie was filmed in a documentary-like, "neorealist" style involving hidden cameras and natural lighting. There are also, however, elements of heavy editing—for example, Shelly Kraicer noted that many scenes have frequent, rapid cuts, partially as a result of filming with inexperienced actors.

Zhang had to work closely with government censors during production of the film. He related how the censors "kept reminding [me] not to show China as too backward and too poor", and said that on the title cards at the end of the movie he had to write that the number of rural children dropping out of school each year was one million, although he believed the number was actually three times that.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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