Not One Less is a 1999 drama film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou
(pictured), adapted from Shi Xiangsheng's 1997 story "A Sun in the
Sky." 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. When one of the boys takes
off in search of work in the big city, she goes looking for him. The
film addresses education reform in China, the economic gap between
urban and rural populations, and the prevalence of bureaucracy and
authority figures in everyday life. It is filmed in a
neorealist/documentary style with a troupe of non-professional actors
who play characters with the same names and occupations as the actors
have in real life, blurring the boundaries between drama and reality.
Internationally, the film was generally well-received, but it also
attracted criticism for its ostensibly political message. When the film
was excluded from the 1999 Cannes Film Festival's competition section,
Zhang withdrew it and another film from the festival, and published a
letter rebuking Cannes for politicization of and "discrimination"
against Chinese cinema.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_One_Less>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1737:
The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy, currently the oldest active
opera house in Europe, was inaugurated.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teatro_di_San_Carlo>
1791:
Northwest Indian War: In the most severe defeat ever suffered by the
United States at the hands of American Indians, the Western Confederacy
won a major victory at the Battle of the Wabash near present-day Fort
Recovery in Ohio.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Clair%27s_Defeat>
1852:
Count Cavour became prime minister of the Kingdom of
Piedmont-Sardinia, which soon expanded to become the Kingdom of Italy.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Benso%2C_conte_di_Cavour>
1869:
Nature, one of the oldest and most reputable general purpose scientific
journals, was first published.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_%28journal%29>
1890:
London's City and South London Railway, the first deep-level
underground railway in the world, opened, running a distance of 5.1 km
(3.2 mi) between the City of London and Stockwell.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_and_South_London_Railway>
1995:
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was mortally wounded by Yigal Amir
while at a peace rally at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
aspirate (v):
1. To remove gas by means of suction.
2. To inhale; to draw into one's lungs.
3. (linguistics) To follow a
consonant with an audible puff of breath
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aspirate>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be
truthful.
--Wilfred Owen
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen>
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