One of the most laudable entries on the recent festival circuit is So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, which has racked up awards at Pusan, Dubai and Berlin. Following her 2005 DiY breakthrough In Between Days, Kim revisited the stories and settings of her childhood in Korea to film a stoic yet deeply affecting chronicle of two young sisters fending for themselves after their mother disappears from their lives. The film recently enjoyed a NYC unveiling at New Directors/New Films, and opens in limited release April 22.

In her review of the film at its Toronto premiere, Karina was most taken by the performances, which, she writes, “are all the more impressive considering the fact that the film’s two young stars are non-actors–––Hee Yeon Kim [who plays older sister Jin] was found in an elementary school in Seoul City, while five year-old Song Hee [as younger sister Bin] was auditioned along with her fellow housemates at a Korean orphange. Hee Yeon Kim’s performance as Jin is absolutely mind-blowing: trudging along with a sadness in her eyes that could only be described as world weary, she’s like a little adult trapped in the body of a girl barely old enough to go to school.”

While the performances of the children are indeed revelatory, there’s a lot of work going on off-screen to pull them off, amounting to a unique strain of filmmaking that incorporates both strict preparation and flexibility, and rigorous screenwriting with documentary improvisation. I sat with Kim during the Berlinale (as she took a quick break between tending to her two children - her film, and her young daughter) to learn more about her technique for filming children and what it was like to shoot an indie film in Korea.

Spout: I’m amazed by how this film looks, in terms of capturing a child’s experience. The camera is very tight on the children and the things they see; you know and see as much as they do. The glimpses of adults and the adult world is fleeting. How did you develop this look?

Kim: In the beginning my cinematographer Anne Misawa and I talked about what I thought was important. One was that the camera is always at the eye level of the girls. Second is that we always shoot the close-ups first. The third is that I didn’t want so much to capture the landscape of Korea. It’s not so much about the fabric of Korean society but a more about the internalized experience of these girls.

Was there a practical reason to start with the close-ups? Was it easier for the kids?

It’s very practical because the first two or three takes are the best. You can’t do too much blocking with them. The best you can hope for is that the camera is on their expressions as they’re sitting or playing in the room and capture that. Because to me that’s the whole movie. Especially with these two girls; they look so amazing. They have this innocence that you see in children, yet there’s so much there. They’re not a blank canvas at all. I think adults have this assumption that children don’t have that much depth, but I go with the assumption that they have so much depth that hasn’t been tapped into yet. That’s what the movie is about. For the older character, Jin, that’s what’s being drawn out of her, but it’s all within her already.

This is a story that could easily succumb to melodrama, but you shun it. It’s almost like watching a documentary. Do you have a background in documentary filmmaking, or how has that genre influenced your work?

I love documentaries. I wish I could be a documentary filmmaker. I tried to make a documentary when I was in Iceland. I was constantly involved in front of the camera, talking to the subjects. I got too involved with the documentary story, so it was terrible. I’m amazed by documentary filmmakers, because how do you stay faithful and honest to these real people.

My first film In Between Days was heavily influenced by Rosetta by the Dardennes Brothers, and they come from documentary filmmaking. I have a lot of gratitude towards them for the way they work. I’ve worked on [husband] Brad Rust Grey’s films, and his way of working has influenced my way of working. For me this film is a lot more formal. I don’t see the film as autobiographical, but I’m really grateful for being able to use personal experience as a motivating factor to get the story going and also to help shape it.

How did you adapt your experiences so that it became its own being and not a literal transposition of your personal history? What are the fictional creations that you are most proud of?

A lot of things that the kids do together were made up on the set with whatever we had available. Almost everything was a combination of something made up on the spot and something written. It kind of drove the Korean crew and the producers crazy, because in the mornings it could be a completely different schedule than what it was the night before, because it depended on the moods of the girls and what they might be experiencing that day. One day were were supposed to shoot the piggy bank scene, and the piggy’s eye fell out. Of course I had no idea that the piggy’s eye would fall out, but it fell out. And I said, “Hey Bin, how about sitting here and coloring the piggy’s eye in?” So she’s coloring the eye in, and I would say to her, “Say, ‘Piggy, when is Mommy coming back?’” or “Can you ask the piggy if it feels better now that you fixed its eye?” And she would say that.

So how much did you shoot in sequence? Was that the original plan?

There were three main locations: Seoul, the aunt’s house, and then the countryside. That was sequential, but within those three chunks it was mixed around. By the time we got to the farm, the kids were so exhausted. These kids had been working every day for the past 25 days. So for the last four days they were exhausted. And the last shot of the film, of them walking home through the field, was the last morning of the shoot. They were so excited.

How much of the story did they kids know going into the filming?

They didn’t know anything about the story, except the older girl’s mom read the script and explained the story generally. Every day, even with the scenes we were shooting, the kids wouldn’t know what it was about. Thankfully they wore the same costumes almost every day, so in the scene where they’re playing with the piggy bank, they end up fighting, and we used the fighting footage in another scene. So it was very flexible.

When I was preparing and writing the script, I read about directors like Kore-Eda Hirokazu and Jacques Doillon and how they worked with kids. I’m so thankful for them. I found out that for Nobody Knows, Kore-Eda had a very small crew, and he worked with the kids and shot over a long period and let them do what they would naturally do. And it was inspiring to see these moments that he’d gathered over a year and to see the seasons and how things developed. And I knew I wouldn’t have as much time as he did, so I had to make sure that things happened for these 29 days and that the kids would be themselves and that the crew was small so they’d trust us.

For the two of them, I worked with them in the beginning like it was a game with rules. And the rules were simple: 1) never look at the camera, 2) never look at me, and 3) always repeat what I say. So it was very simple. But these two kids were amazing. The way we cast them was that I went to all these schools to obsere kids and after observing the classes I’d pick out two or three kids that I thought were interesting and I’d do video interviews with them. And during the interviews I’d give the kids instructions, like “Count to 10. Go to the corner. Look out the window. Count to 20. After you count to 20 come back to me and look back into my eyes for five counts, and then go out the door.” So I’d give them instructions like this to see if they could follow.  I went through hundreds of girls like this.

Doing that with the two girls makes it sound like a game. But doing that every day for hours over several weeks must have been grueling. How did you sustain their commitment throughout the shoot?

Well it’s hard for even the crew to go through that kind of rigorous schedule. These girls were amazing, but of course they’d lose it several times during the day. Everyone goes through these cycles, where they feel energized in the morning and then in the afternoon they are low energy, and we take a break and then they come back. We cut back on our daily schedule. We’d shoot the kids from 9 to 7. Crew times started at 8AM and we’d be done by dinnertime. The older girl’s mom was there so she had a fulltime caretaker. The younger girl had my assistant as a fulltime caretaker. One thing we tried to do was not to bribe them with things, like cakes or cookies or toys.

So did you talk them through their bad states?

I’d shoot them. As they’re crying or having a breakdown. Because I needed those moments, and I’m a selfish director, so a lot of those crying moments in the films were when they were just exhausted.

How much of an adjustment was shooting on Super 16 after shooting on DV for In Between Days?

It was a huge adjustment. We used the ARRI SR-3. It was so heavy and the magazine was noisy. We shot mostly on sticks, and I’d originally wanted to shoot handheld like the Dardennes’ Rosetta. But we tried on the first day and we had to abandon it, because it was very distracting for the kids. But I liked how it ended up looking calm and composed.

And things you do with staging and rack focus is so precise. And still it allows for incredible moments. Near the end there’s a scene where the older sister Jin asks her grandmother for new shoes and then she notices the holes in her grandmother’s shoes, and you can practically see the lightbulb go in her head: “Grandma doesn’t have new shoes, maybe I shouldn’t ask for them either.” How do you capture that? There’s almost no way you can direct that with a child actor.

Yes, it’s a miracle. We shot 40 hours of footage. With a shot like that you can only imagine how many takes we took. With a moment like that you can’t tell her how to look, or it will come off as false, because the kids are so transparent. So it really is a miracle.

It sounds like the setup to a tasteless joke: a Peruvian woman keeps a potato in her vagina to guard her chastity. It’s the premise to the Golden Bear Best Picture winner at this year’s Berlinale, Claudia Llosa’s La Teta Asustada aka The Milk of Sorrow. The biggest joke of all may be that this strange, vivid portrait of a village girl’s induction into the mysteries of adulthood has more poetic moments to match its audacious ideas than just about any of its competition.

This year’s Competition field was cluttered with global issues movies whose collective overreaching far exceeded their grasp. The worst culprit was Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams as a comfortably numb Manhattan yuppie couple with the world’s most symbolic refrigerator, packed as it is with provisions neglected in favor of home-delivered organic pizza. Bernal, on a biz trip to Thailand, tries to save a prostitute from her plight, while Williams stews at home as their daughter spurns her for their soulful Filipino nanny (trend takers note: Pinoy is the new Black). The two threads are eventually connected by one of the most insulting plot twists conceivable, one which left the press screening bathing with boos. Cheers greeted another shallow take on saving third-world hookers, Annette K. Olsen’s Little Soldier, possibly because it had a more ironic take on the subject (the hooker-saver this time being an Iraq War Veteran, not so subtly symbolizing first-world sanctimony). Of the many Competition takes on global ills, the most interesting one was also the most commercial: Tom Tykwer’s The International, whose failings as an action crowd-pleaser (ineffectual protagonists and complicated plot twists) are also what make it an honest though deadly cynical take on the elusive tyranny of international banking.

Among this company, The Milk of Sorrow deserves its prize, because its ideas are not an end in themselves, but a starting point for a lucid image stream full of both the grit of poverty and the poetry of personal perception. Think Carlos Reygadas with more historical grounding and a distinctly feminine subjectivity (the title references the psychological effects of war crimes inflicted on Peruvian women during the Shining Path campaigns). Even better, and possibly the best film I saw at the festival, was, like Llosa’s, a female director’s second feature: Maren Ade’s Everyone Else.  Sort of a contemporary hipster update to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, it follows the disintegration of a couple’s relationship during an idyllic excursion to the Italian countryside. The film captures the strange, joyful moments that can only be shared between lovers, then chronicles a series of pin-sized but painful betrayals that inflict near-fatal damage to that fragile intimacy. Fortunately, the film’s numerous jewels of observation contained in small scenes weren’t lost on the Jury, which bestowed the Best Actress Golden Bear to Birgit Minichmayr, Germany’s free-spirited answer to Renee Zellweger. The film’s success marks another victory for the New Berlin School, a label that’s been attached to low-budget indie filmmakers like Ade and their modest but precisely executed examinations of contemporary German life.

The American indie scene was represented in Competition by the likes of Owen Moverman’s The Messenger (which nabbed the Best Screenplay Golden Bear) and Mitchell Lichtenstein’s quizzical Happy Tears; elsewhere, the festival’s more adventurous Forum section yielded a couple of standouts. Some of the most remarkable camerawork of the festival was found in The Exploding Girl by Bradley Rust Grey (married to So Yong Kim, whose Treeless Mountain premiered last year in Toronto but was another Forum highlight). Inspired by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumiere, Grey uses telephoto long takes to achieve an incredible sense of private experience between his young, emotionally unsettled protagonists, even in the midst of noisy Manhattan street scenes. Then there’s Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, Beeswax, which somehow inspired no small measure of ire, matched with equal degrees of admiration. Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE walked out of the film after less than an hour, yet somehow generated four paragraphs detailing how Bujalski “says nothing of even the slightest interest, displays no care or forethought in its conception, and positively revels in its slipshod amateurishness.” Others have invoked the standard comparisons to Rohmer, Cassavetes, etc. in Bujalski’s defense.

One thing that’s apparent with Beeswax is that Bujalski has graduated from the phase of requiring comparison to established auteurs. By now he has established his own distinctive sensibility, where stumblingly funny conversations amidst the bric-a-brac interiors of people’s homes barely conceal a fundamental sense of fear. This fear is embodied in wheelchair-bound Tilly Hatcher (one of the most authentic and multi-dimensional portrayals of disability in cinema history) as she struggles to run her thrift store with help from her flaky twin sister and pseudo-boyfriend.  Like everything else presented in the film, Bujalski doesn’t dwell on the fact of Hatcher’s disability but lets it inform the theme of interdependency that’s at the heart of this comic drama. The film’s quirky title is a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.  While this year’s Berlinale was overloaded with breast-beating efforts to show the interconnectedness of the world population, this film truly delivered on that promise.

The festival may have yielded a bumper crop of disappointments (Sally Potter’s Rage and Rebecca Miller’s Private Lives of Pippa Lee were two other films that received no small degree of spite), but the embarrassing number of journalists that have written the festival off as a disaster betray their own profession. There were plenty of films scattered between the different sections and sidebars to make for a worthwhile experience, which is the job of the film writer to discover and share. Here are several more films worth keeping an eye out for should they come your way:

By Comparison - Harun Farocki’s hour-long, nearly wordless study of how bricks are made around the world has more tactile cinematic artistry and insight into globalization than the entire competition lineup.

About Elly (dir. Asghar Farhadi)

The Fish Child (dir. Lucia Puenzo)

Deep in the Valley (dir. Atsushi Funahashi)

Mental (dir. Kazuhiro Soda) – playing Feb. 22 at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight.

Bluebeard (dir. Catherine Breillat)

Yang Yang (dir. Cheng Yu-Cheh)

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)

Land of Scarecrows (dir. Roh Gyong-tae)

Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (dir. Oksana Bulgakowa)

5. Killer Mike featuring Ice Cube, “Pressure” Directed by Giovanni Hidalgo

One can only imagine how many hours director Hidalgo spent ripping and mixing clips off the internet, cable news, and who knows where else, but watching the result is like a long night’s cram session for a Black liberation theory class in the space of a song.

The sheer breadth of footage is breathtaking, flashing everything from archival newsreel to Hollywood clips to graphic crime videos. The shock-and-awe montage makes it hard to arrive at a coherent thesis for grappling with the laundry list of social ills laid out by both the lyrics and visuals, full of jarring juxtapositions that radically recontextualize familiar images and figures into an alternative universe of hip-hop resistance. Even Barack Obama doesn’t come away unscathed: his “Yes We Can” iconography is eventually followed by a clip of him dancing with Ellen Degeneres that’s as ingratiating as Stepin Fetchit. The lasting effect is a purposeful distancing from the daily stream of images that spoon-feed us into complacency, something that viewers of any race or background can take to heart.

As Ice Cube says, “I’m here to deprogram you.” A machine gun spray of media-fueled dissonance, “Pressure” accomplishes in six minutes what took Oliver Stone’s JFK three hours.

Zoom in on: 2:46. The juxtaposition of Saddam Hussein and O.J. Simpson at their respective trails exemplifies the mad method of this video: a knee-jerk provocation, an inspired association, or both.

Compare to: Terry Lynn, ”The System”

4. O’Death, “Lowtide” Directed by Benh Zeitlin

The perfect marriage of Jean Cocteau and hillbilly folk rock, the video for “Lowtide” starts on the most polluted shoreline imaginable, littered with thousands of bottles, from which a redneck Orpheus plucks one bottle cast from the other end of the world. The message of despair contained within propels him to bore deep into the earth to find his own Eurydice of the Orient. This live action equivalent of a claymation video literally spills over with dirt in its headlong rush towards love and resurrection. It’s a stunningly lo-fi vision of a journey to the center of the earth whose inventiveness is worth a thousand Brendan Fraser paychecks.

Zoom in on: 0:28. Ask not how they did that (though really, how?) but how they captured that feeling of giddy love at first sight that suspends you in air.

Compare to: Passion Pit: “Sleepyhead”

3. Kanye West, “Love Lockdown” Directed by Simon Henwood

Kanye certainly was no slouch in the music video department this year, issuing no less than six clips, each with their own distinctive look. “Flashing Lights” got a ton of attention on the blogosphere (SpoutBlog not excluded), but the Takashi Murakami-helmed “Good Morning,” Hype Williams’ “Heartless” and especially the exultant “Good Life,” by Jonas & Francois with animation by So Me, are exquisite in their own right. But sufficient praise has not been lavished on the first video off the 808s and Heartbreak album.

“Love Lockdown” is a perfect harmony of tension between elegance and rawness, the futuristic and the primitive, virtual fantasy and real pain. In many ways it’s an apotheosis of what the best of Kanye is about: a searching scrutiny of his best friend and worst enemy, his ego. Its lustful striving to realize its wildest fantasies renders him a prisoner within his own desire, unable to privilege anything or anyone else, redeemed only by its honesty in facing this state. It’s Synecdoche, New York, only told with a refreshing lack of self-pity and a ton more cinematic in setting psychic demons to space and time.

I’ll probably get laughed out of the room for comparing this to the brooding masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, but this video deserves comparison with Solaris: not for the suggestively symbolic telescope prominently placed in his crib, but for the stream of illusory objects of desire that demonize the mind, floating within the stark isolation of a sterile utopia.

Zoom in on: The guy leaping out of the 16:9 frame at 1:02 is one of those moments that has you wondering why no one had ever thought of doing that before. But 2:35 is the moment that gets me, with Kanye cornered by his primal counterpart, his internal, eternal entourage.

Compare to: Kanye West, “Flashing Lights”

2. Yeasayer, “Wait for the Summer” Directed by Mixtape Club

Another video involving dirt and decay, video animation trio Mixtape Club takes Yeasayer’s thematic variation on The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” to set in motion one of the most morbidly beautiful meditations on nature you’re bound to find anywhere. It’s 60s rock psychedelia done with 21st century CGI, flowing in a free-associational ballet dancing along the ABCs of life: apples, beetles, crabs, death, earth. And if you’ve ever wondered if the universe is rotten to the core, the last image might serve the answer.

Zoom in on: It’s hard not to give props to those hovering Jedi Knight beetles at 0:56, but an iPod commercial can only dream of using silhouettes as majestically as what you see at 2:42.

Compare to: Goldfrapp, “A&E”

1. MGMT, “Time to Pretend” Directed by Ray Tintori

An OC beach party-meets–Lord of the Flies-meets-Lord of the Rings-meets-Second Life-meets-God knows what else. MGMT and Tintori took the song’s campus org t-shirt lyric “We’ve got the vision; now let’s have some fun” and used it as a rallying cry to dive headfirst into a maelstrom of ill-advised pagan hipster imagery executed with cheeseball CGI. The result is not something as simple as laughably endearing kitsch, but something brave and audacious. Ostensibly it lampoons any number of expensive, computerized blockbuster fantasy sagas, but gradually it suggests a realm that is infinitely more exciting than Middle Earth or Narnia, where crab monsters explode into dolphins and bare-chested warriors ride tabby cats to victory. (And with the final glimpse of Andrew VanWyngarden surfing through a cresting wave of shark’s teeth, we might have found the year’s quintessential image for the independent artist.) A vision emerges of Hollywood collapsing under its own market-tested, terminally safe weight, only to have its cindered ruins paved over by a horde of low-budget, low-tech pastiches along the lines of this one. Maybe it amounts to another kind of hell, but at least it has prettier colors.

Zoom in on: 2:34. This was the moment that I was convinced that what I was watching wasn’t something merely clever, goofy, self-deprecating, but could achieve original lyric beauty, and had just done so.

Compare to: Vampire Weekend: “Oxford Comma”