Treeless Mountain was a low budget movie released in 2008 directed by Korean-American So-yong Kim that has had a number of good reviews so I decided to check it out.

The movie starts out with the mother of two young girls, 5 year old Bin and 7 year old Jin dropping them off to live with their “Big Aunt” while she goes to look for the husband who abandoned them. Their mom gives the girls a piggy bank and tells them that when they fill the piggy bank up with coins she will come back to pick them up.  So in effort to collect coins the girls sell grilled grasshoppers to other kids.  They eventually fill it up, but of course the mom doesn’t come back.  While they are doing this their “Big Aunt” ends up not being much better than the girls’ parents because she doesn’t regularly give them food and is generally uncaring.  Eventually the mom sends a letter to the “Big Aunt” to drop their girls off at her elderly parents farm because she hasn’t patched things up with her husband yet.  In typical Korean movie fashion the poor, but nice grandma proves to be the caring figure the girls needed.  And that folks is the movie and why it was a snooze fest.

The character development was poor and basically most the movie is just of the two young girls collecting and grilling grasshoppers and generally doing nothing.  The acting of the two young girls played by Hee-yeon Kim as Jin and Song-hee Kim as Bin were the only positives of the movie.  In the director interview included with the DVD, So-yong Kim says that she found Hee-yeong Kim while conducting a casting tour through various Korean elementary schools.  Interestingly Song-hee Kim was found in a government run home in South Korea, which kind of mirrors the character she portrayed.  The two girls are adorable the rest of the movie not so much.

If you are looking for a good Korean children family drama I recommend skipping this movie and instead watch The Way Home, which is a far superior movie.