If There is a Reason to Study (2016)

Original title

學習的理由

Directed by

楊逸帆

Genre

documentary film

Country

Taiwan

Runtime

1h 36m

Rated

普遍級

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary follows a group of students in Taiwan as they prepare for a high-stakes high school entrance exam. Filmed over seven years by a director who was their classmate, it shows how the exam and school tracking systems shape their lives into college. It also looks at a broader pattern where people adapt to fit the rules of whatever system allocates resources to them.

reflectiveintimateobservationalsoberinglongitudinalpersonalthought-provokinggroundedearnest

What happens

If There Is a Reason to Study (Native title: 學習的理由) is an ethnographic documentary film spanning 7 years directed by Adler Yang. The production of the film started in March 2009, when Yang was 14 years old, studying at the Humanity (RenWen) Junior High School as a grade 8 student. The film was theatrically released in Taiwan and Hong Kong since August 2016 by crowdfunding, screening at major theaters in Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Yilan, Kowloon, etc. The film has also been selected in more than 10 film festivals internationally, receiving 11 awards and recognitions. In the film, Yang documented the story of his friends' in the Humanity Junior High facing the high-stakes high school entrance exam, the Basic Competence Test (BCT), and followed them until their college years. The film not only examines how high-stakes testing and the tracking systems shape students' lives in the long run but also uncovers a more common struggle beyond school, which Yang calls Allocation Dependence: As long as one grows a dependency on allocated resources or/and the resource allocation system, one will strive to fit into the allocation criteria, even at the cost of, including but not limited to, alienation, waste (i.e., some qualities have to be trimmed off/disposed of), disparity (i.e., every person's standing point are more or less advantageous or disadvantageous in the face of the criteria), exhaustion (i.e., people's behaviors shift away from resource regeneration and focus on fitting into the allocation criteria), and fragility (i.e., people loses their capability of obtaining and regenerating resource if, by any reason, the allocation cease to function). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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