For this film review, I decided to watch the film Confucius (original title: Kong Zi) by director Mei Hu. When I heard about this film during our first lectures, I was really excited to see it since I teach about Confucius and am always looking for videos to show students to help them visualize what they read. The film focuses on the life of Confucius, focusing on the later part of his life when he is banished from the kingdom and then goes to spread his ideas.

In terms of use in the classroom, I would use it to show the different settings of China and give them an idea of what the culture was like in ancient times. Since the film was over 2 hours and all in subtitles, I probably would not show the whole film in one setting to my sixth graders because of their attention span, but instead show clips of the film to supplement what they are reading. In the first few minutes of the film (around 7-8 minutes), it talks about Confucius' beliefs and what he stands for, which would be great to show after the students read about Confucianism to give them a break between paragraphs. There is also another clip around the 16th minute mark that makes references to filial piety and the values of Confucianism that would be valuable to show to students to explain how this concept works (as well as the opening scenes where a child slave escapes and does not want to respect his master, a great discussion could be had here about the ethics of this and how it connects to filial piety). There is also a cool scene where Confucius and Lao Zi come face to face in the film, and once again, it would be great to have students predict what they may say to each before the clip is shown, and see how close their predictions/connections are. Overall, if used in snippets, this film is great to use in the classroom to supplement readings and help students visualize what they are reading.