Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)

In this low-key Ozuesque Korean drama, a mother goes off to try to find her husband, leaving her two daughters with their callous aunt. The girls are too young to fully grasp what's going on and go from day to day imagining that they'll be soon reunited with their mother, turning with the pragmatism innate to the very young and innocent to displacement activities such as catching grasshoppers to occupy their time.

So Yong Kim's film contains no dramatic events beyond this but passes amiably enough, with the two waifs independent more than sentimentalised, and there are no great pretensions to do more than tell things as they are. It's of interest to note that men are wholly absent from the film, only ever seen at a distance if at all. The only close-up exception is a stranger who tells the children that their aunt's number is disconnected; the allusion to masculine abandonment is obvious.

6/10