The Road

Jiang Nengjie • 2010

The documentary film, The Road, reveals the status of 22 students who study in a private village school in Hunan Province. Through in-depth interviews, the inner world of these “left-behind children” who are lack of parental love has been explored. We hope that through this film, we could hear the responses and actions from our society. And also this documentary film reveals the lag-behind rural education problems.Due to the problem of dilapidated teaching buildings, the only primary school in Guang’an Village, has to move to the town and been merged with an center-town primary school in 2002 as the response to the government policy, which is, to merge more students and schools together. But this has caused a series of problems for Guang’an Village. Taking the inconvenient traffic as an example, some kids are too young to walk the long distance to school with parents, meanwhile, a vast majority of these pupils ’parents works outside the village, leaving their grandparents farming the land at home. But for their children’s future, at least one grandparent from the family has to rent an apartment in the town to accompany these kids studying. This causes additional expenses, thus it becomes a heavy burden for the family. Under this circumstance, the village decided to rebuild a private school, which has totally enrolled 22 students in Grade One…….