Winner of a 1998 Golden Apple award, Leonard Kamerling's evolutionary-paced Heart of the Country offers 90 non-narrated minutes charting a year in the life of a rural Japanese elementary school and its beloved principal Shinichi Yasutomo. We are shown such badly-in-need-of-editing sights as: children performing calisthenics, a PTA meeting, a parent-teacher conference, a school party, and graduation. Interspersed throughout these scenes are comments from parents, teachers and Yasutomo himself that can be nutshelled thus: educate the heart, cultivate friendships, be honest, and get along. Education? Well, that's kind of a secondary concern here. In fact, as parents, teachers, and Yasutomo all pretty much recite the same homily-laden "it takes a village" paean to the human heart, downplaying the curricular aspect of education, you get the distinct sense that only one viewpoint--and a pretty simplistic one at that--is being expressed here. Yasutomo, whom we see transferred to another school at the end of the documentary, tells one or two interesting stories to illustrate his good-hearted approach, but his interview snippets never remotely coalesce into anything resembling a coherent theory of education. In short, Heart of the Country is not the most intelligent $440 purchase for your limited budget dollar. Aud: E, I, C, P. (R. Pitman)
Heart of the Country
(1997) 90 min. $440. First Run/Icarus Films. PPR. Color cover. Vol. 14, Issue 4
Heart of the Country
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