The director of "Like A Friend," Yi Han, told China.org.cn that he made his drama about China's left-behind children and underdogs to encourage people to walk on bravely despite hardships in life.

The film will hit Chinese theaters on Friday. Yi revealed that the story and the protagonist, played by veteran actor Chen Chuang, is based on the life of one of his relatives. The family member, his cousin's son, hasn't joined a family reunion during Spring Festival for years. Yi later discovered that this relative was too ashamed to come back because of his personal situation -- such as not making decent money or having got married.

"I felt that he's not the only one who suffers from personal pressures – many youths, especially those working in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing, also face such mental stress if the life doesn't work out for them. I thought I could make a film for them, as this pressure is universal," Yi said. "We should pay attention to the underdogs and their worries."

Yi drew inspiration from people he has encountered over the years and the social environment in his hometown Yichun, Jiangxi province. He said he was upset with some people whose measure of success is still whether you earn big money or buy a house. "This ignores a person's kindness and character as well as whether an individual is in a predicament that they cannot get out of," Yi said.

"Like A Friend" follows an unusual summer friendship between a lone adult and a bullied child. The director said he based the child partly on himself and his own experiences. What's more, the child, played by Guo Kexuan, highlights another issue: left-behind children, referring to those children in rural areas not raised by their parents, who travel out of town to big cities to find employment as migrant workers. Many children are instead often raised by their grandparents or other relatives.

Yi and his team cast all the child actors from nearly 6,000 real left-behind children. "The children were not professional actors, but the adult actors were. How to merge them together in the same film and achieve the same level of acting was therefore challenging for me. However, only the real left-behind children could give me that realness, the emotion – what I wanted for the film."

Chen Chuang agreed, noting the child actors are raw and 100% pure. "Everything they do is so real; when they cry, they really cry. That meant we actors needed to respond to them with our acting skills to make up for the lack of emotion and purity to the extent that they have. "

While both the director and the actor admitted they didn't know of a suitable solution to China's left-behind children problem, they said that they hoped their film could help raise awareness and have people reflect on the issue. They also hoped that the migrant workers could come back home to be with their children more.

"In my observation, as China's economy grows, many migrants are returning from big coastal cities to their hometowns as they are now able to find jobs inland. Therefore, they can accompany children more. Things have been improved very much since the last decade," Yi said.

Yi's previous film "The Rising Star Kindergarten," released in 2007, also focused on the lives of left-behind children.

"Like A Friend" premiered at last year's Pingyao International Film Festival and received positive reviews. Hong Kong-based superstar singer Eason Chan was touched by the story and sang the theme song.

Yi concluded by saying that he wants to deliver a message through his new film: "People need to be kind, warm, and inclusive to those marginalized individuals in trouble. Only then can society become warm, caring, and united again."

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