The actors are not professionals, but local people playing characters with their own names. Wei Minzhi, a red-cheeked 13-year-old who usually looks very intent, stars as Wei, a substitute teacher, also very intent. The village’s schoolmaster has been called away to his mother's deathbed, and Wei's assignment is to teach the grade school class.

To assist her in this task, she is supplied with one piece of chalk for every day the teacher will be away. And she gets strict instructions: Since the school's subsidy depends on its head count, she is to return the full class to the teacher - "not one less." Keeping all the students in the class is more important than anything she teaches them, and indeed she isn't a lot more advanced than her students. This isn't one of those movies where the inspired teacher awakens the minds and spirits of her class; Wei copies lessons on the board and blocks the door.

These early scenes are interesting in the way they don't exploit the obvious angles of the story. This isn't a pumped-up melodrama or an inspirational tearjerker, but a matter-of-fact look at a poor rural area where necessity is the mother of all invention and everything else. When one of her students Zhang (Zhang Huike), runs away to look for work in the big city, Wei determines to follow him and bring him back. This is not an easy task. It involves raising money to buy a bus ticket. Wei puts the whole class to work shifting bricks for a local factory to earn funds. She eventually does get to the city, Jiangiakou, and her encounters with bureaucracy there area a child's shadow of the heroine's problems in Zhang Yimou'a The Story of Qui Ju (1992).

The city scenes are not as compelling for me as the earlier ones, maybe because Wei's patience tries my own. She waits what seems like forever outside the gates of a TV studio, hoping to talk to the man in charge, and although her determination is admirable, it could have been suggested in less screen time. Once she does get on TV, there's a moment of absolute authenticity when the anchorwoman asks her a question, and Wei just stares dumbfounded at the camera.

For Chinese viewers, this film will play as a human drama (end tiles mention how many children drop out of school in China every year). For Western viewers, there's almost equal interest at the edges of the screen, in he background, in the locations and incidental details that show daily life in today's China. Once of the buried messages is the class divide that exists even today in the People's Republic, where TV bureaucrats live in a different world than 13-year-old rural school girls. Zhang Yimou, whose films have sometimes landed him in trouble with the authorities, seems to have made a safe one this time. But in the margins he may be making comments of his own.

With the local primary-school teacher of a remote, run-down Chinese village about to take a month off to visit his ailing mother, the mayor enlists a substitute to take over the class of about 30 children. The trouble is, Wei Minzhi has no teaching experience and is only 13 herself - and truancy's rife. As Teacher Gao leaves, he promises that if she can prevent the class shrinking further, he'll pay 10 yuan over and above the 50 she's dues at the month's end. Fair enough, but the pupils include a mischievous

ten-year-old, Zhang Huike, who'd probably be off in the blink of an eye even if his impoverished family didn't need him to go out and find work...

Zhang Yimou's film comes on like a cross between his own 'The Story of Qiu Ju', Cehn Kaige's 'King of the Children’ and all manner of recent Iranian films depicting the quests undertaken by children. Though Zhang seldom foregoes an opportunity to catch a cute kid's expression, at least until the end of the film he mostly steers well clear of Hollywood-style schmaltz. In this respect he's well served by a non-professional cast, playing characters whose station in life is identical to their own: Wei Minzhi and Zhang Huike, especially, are enormously effective, and only come unstuck in later lachrymose moments. Less successful is the somewhat soft view of Chinese TV executives (echoes of 'Qiu Ju's' kindly bureaucrats) and, more generally, the shift of the scene to the city in the last half-hour. But the carting of Wei Minzhin's wayward but determined efforts to maintain discipline at school is deft, pacy and engrossing; and, save for the overemphasis of the uplifting ending, the gentle humanism makes for a film of considerable charm.