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.

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(With Sundance rapidly wrapping up and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)

Tze Chun’s micro-budget Sundance Spectrum entry Children of Invention sneaks up on you. Inspired by the filmmaker’s own childhood experiences, the film follows Raymond (Michael Chen) and Tina (Crystal Chiu), two first generation Chinese kids growing up in Boston with Elaine (Cindy Cheung), their overworked, illegal immigrant single mom. After Elaine’s savings vanish in a vitamin sales pyramid scheme, the family loses their home and moves into a model condo unit in an unfinished building. With her estranged husband slacking on child support payments, Elaine gets involved in another pyramid scheme and is eventually arrested. Afraid that Tina and Raymond will be taken away if she tells the police she’s left two young children home alone, Elaine says nothing, and with their mom disappeared with no explanation, the kids are left to fend for themselves.

Like the somewhat narratively similar Treeless Mountain, Invention presents an adult world through the eyes of a child. But unlike that meditation on the loneliness, isolation and confusion of two very small children, Invention has a sense of adventure. Primary colors abound, not least in the film’s several dips into subtle daydream magical realism, as Tina and Raymond respond to their trials and tribulations with a kind of make-do play. As the hopelessness of the family’s economic situation becomes more and more clear and the dread mounts, it becomes equally apparent how disconnected the kids are from their reality. The result is an edge-of-your-seat family drama, pushed beyond the constraints of its micro-budget by two heartbreaking child actor performances.

I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.

In a director’s statement circulated by her film’s publicist, writer/director So Yong Kim says Treeless Mountain, which is “inspired by events from my early childhood in Pusan, Korea,” doubles as “a letter to my mother.” This makes the film even more of a heartbreaker––if that’s even a possibility. An autobiographical feature about two tiny girls sent to live with distant relatives by their caring but insolvent mother, Treeless Mountain is a sparse but incredibly moving film about love turning to longing turning to resentment, and if I as a total outsider could barely hold back tears whilst watching it, I can only imagine the strength required to pull such a story from one’s own life and throw it up on a screen.

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