Not necessarily little or red, but ideally filled with students of all ages and a single dedicated teacher, the one-room schoolhouse is an enduring myth. However much belied by present reality, this warm legend carries over even into the huge hard urban/suburban school, as well. Most everyone can recall some special teacher of long ago and, selfish incompetents like Ichabod Crane conveniently forgotten, at a second's notice rattle off inspiring if not always inspired screen educators -- Robert Donat or Peter O'Toole, Glenn Ford, Sidney Poitier, Sandy Dennis, Robin Williams, Edward James Olmos, Michelle Pfeiffer.

If in the isolated setting and the music hook, respectively, John Voight's and Meryl Streep's turns come to mind, Small Voices is, nevertheless, a worthy and in ways unique continuation of the tradition. While this Philippine film breaks no radically new ground nor offers surprises at the end -- two brief memory flashbacks only momentarily postpone the inevitable, and a snafued official announcement seems like an unworthy cheap shot -- it is a refreshingly sweet film experience, a calm look at problems often considered before though seldom more winningly.

Currently based in New York while remaining one of his country's preeminent independent filmmakers, director/co-writer/-producer Gil M. Portes is known in his homeland for broaching delicate political, economic and social issues. This, his twenty-fifth feature but the first scheduled for national US theatrical release, was the Philippine's entry for the 2002 Academy and Golden Globe Awards.

Inspired by the experiences of the director's idealistic niece and by the country's difficult rural troubles of crippling poverty, child farm labor and insurgent guerrilla activity, the story, filmed in Quezon, is set in dirt-poor backwater Malawig. Clutching a suitcase with little beyond a scarcely dry City University of Manila diploma, memories and photos of her beloved father, and her mother's pleas to join her and make money in America, Melinda B. Santiago [Alessandra de Rossi] arrives at a dilapidated elementary school as replacement for another teacher who has succumbed to the lure of a year's regularly paid salary in Singapore.

Film and TV veteran De Rossi looks younger than her twenty years. But her nicely understated presence, slight frame and Giaconda smile carry the burden of the movie, as she instinctively challenges the bribery and corruption to which principal and fellow teachers [Dexter Doria, Irma Adlawan, Malou Crisologo] helplessly acquiesce. She has to inspire self-confidence in her mixed bag of students as well as gain the at least momentary consent of uneducated parents who see schooling as a hindrance to sons going to work and daughters marrying to produce babies.

One student's mother insists that "only the rich can afford to dream," that they, the downtrodden poor, can do nothing to better conditions. Armed with her late father's emphasis on toughness, patience and "great rewards only come from great efforts," Ma'am Melinda must find a way to bring her pupils together and to win their elders' approval. That way is through music, specifically her father's treasured flute and the upcoming costumed Grand Choral Competition at Central School in a nearby town.

In purposely unspectacular, non-travelogue colors and landscapes that reflect drudgery and the endurance of the inhabitants and their land, against a suitably quiet eclectic music track and numerous short scenes that combine for a feeling of simplicity in multiplicity, Small Voices is easy to watch. Even the sounds of not understood and thus subtitled Tagalog blend with the whole, along with a few effective, often humorous lines spoken in English.

There is a basic stoicism throughout, in the face of death in Communist insurgency conflict or abuse of naïve women lured abroad, and emotions are kept in proportion, not overindulged. Melinda moves and motivates her inadequately prepared fellow teachers, her students and her adopted community. Against the odds, perhaps things will change. These people have learned that dreams must not be given up -- doctor, nurse, pilot, a tomorrow better than yesterday and today, or simply "rekindled passion" from a romance novel.

Winning a competition, or mere brute physical survival, is not the essential: for that reason, the awkwardly managed contest results might well have been cut from Small Voices. But, after all, a tear of relief, or of joy, is also a reward.

(Released by Sky Island Films; not rated by MPAA.)