Paul Chen comments on Zhang Yimou's documentary, Not One Less. Tackling the high drop-out rate in rural China as its subject, Chen believes the film seems to endorse the state-sponsored Hope Project, which aims to raise money to place drop-out rural children back in school. Set in contemporary northern China, this film tells the story of a thirteen-year-old rural substitute teacher, Wei Minzhi, stubbornly trying to keep her twenty-eight students in school. In an attempt to retrieve one boy, Zhang Huike, whose family debt forces him to quit school and seek work in a nearby city, Wei finds herself in the strange and indifferently sophisticated city crowd. Chen states that the assumption of the film's confusion is justified by Zhang use of "documentary aesthetics."
"(Zhang's documentary involves) placing the camera on the street," location shooting in this film purports to deliver a slice of life, and more specifically, to elicit and capture the amateur actors' spontaneous (re)actions in real-life settings."
Chen futhur goes into how Yimou is effectively able to convert the rural village into a spectacle.
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