Treeless Mountain

So Yong Kim’s debut feature, In Between Days, depicted an adolescent romance between Korean immigrants in Canada; it was notable for the way Kim kept her frame tight on the faces of her protagonists, shutting out any people, places, or objects that were extraneous to the would-be couple’s intensely self-absorbed experience. For Treeless Mountain, Kim employs a similar strategy, keeping her camera low to the ground and trained on extreme close-ups of mundane objects, in order to replicate the point of view of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old whose mother has left abruptly, sticking them in a home with an indifferent relative. The girls’ “Big Auntie” drinks herself into a stupor and often fails to feed them—“Why waste my money?” she grumbles—so the youngsters survive by roasting crickets and scrounging snacks from sympathetic neighbors. Because no one’s really in charge of them, these kids get by on pure caprice. Even their plan to wish their mother back by earning enough coins to fill their piggy bank is, to put it mildly, not that well thought-through.