Not One Less

Not One Less (一个都不能少, 1999) is a Chinese drama from director Zhang Yimou — watch it online on iFILM. Wei Minzhi is thirteen years old and has no teaching experience when she's sent to cover a rural village school for a month. The outgoing teacher's only instruction: make sure every one of the twenty-eight students is still there when he gets back.

One boy leaves for the city to find work. Wei decides she's going after him. Zhang Yimou cast non-professional actors throughout, many of them playing versions of themselves, and the result sits somewhere between fiction and documentary — loose and unguarded in a way that studio productions rarely manage. The film took the Golden Lion at Venice in 1999, the jury responding to exactly that quality.

What stays with you isn't the poverty or the bureaucracy, though both are present. It's the stubbornness of a young girl who decides that one missing child is not acceptable. Stream Not One Less (1999) online on iFILM.