Not One Less

When the local schoolteacher takes off a month to visit his dying mother, 13-year-old Wei is appointed teacher. She is warned that if even one student drops out, she will lose her salary. But with the poor conditions in the rural region, one of the students is taken out of school to go off and work. Wei takes off after him towards the big city... With a naturalistic style, full of simple though dramatically loaded moments, Zhang Yimou presents an acute look at a modern China torn between tradition and modernity.