I saw TREELESS MOUNTAIN at the Hawaii International Film Festival because there was a nice writeup on it in the Honolulu Advertiser. Plus, it won 3 awards at film festivals. I'm not sure what all the acclaim was about because I thought TREELESS MOUNTAIN was horrible. It pretty much focuses on these two girls who were deserted by their mother. I'm not completely clear as to the reason why, but I read somewhere it was because she went off to look for her husband, who deserted her. So that makes a lot of sense. The husband deserts the wife, and the wife deserts her children. Obviously the wife didn't like her husband deserting her (otherwise why would she be looking for him), and didn't even consider that her children may not like being deserted by not only their father but their mother as well! As you can see, there wasn't much character development of the mother. So what we're left with are these two girls, who were first dumped off at their aunt's house. The aunt gets tired of babysitting them so she dumped them off at their grandparents' house. (I'm not sure how old the girls were--probably 7 and 9 years old.) Anyway, the film focuses on these two girls left to their own devices because I guess in Korea it's not a state law for children to go to school. Or, maybe this all happened during summer vacation. Again--this was not clear in the film. Back to these two girls. The camera focuses on them basically doing nothing. You see them manually washing their laundry, their grandmother helping them bake something in the kitchen, and other mundane stuff. I couldn't wait for this movie to be over. I would NOT recommend this movie. If you want to see a better film about a child that was deserted by his parents, I would highly recommend a Brazilian film called THE YEAR MY PARENTS WENT ON VACATION. At least there was more action in that movie.
Review of Treeless Mountain
