Seen at one of the market screenings. My expectations were high, so I was rather disappointed. Somewhere between Lee Jeong-hyang's The Way Home and Koreeda's Nobody Knows, minus the poignant brilliance of either one othese films (the latter, in particular, which I deem to be a masterpiece), Kim So-young's Treeless Mountain is a largely autobiographical story about two little girls, abandoned by their mother. Maybe it's just me but it completely failed to resonate with my (perhaps) jaded sensibility and left me utterly unmoved and bored from start to finish. One of my firm beliefs in life has always been that: just because it's personal doesn't necessarily make it interesting or exciting. In the end, the feelings that the director seems to be trying to convey feel like a quotation. Like a lot of  openly autobiographical works of art, I am tempted to add. Curious how the will, the desire to be "authentic" often leads to an end-result that feels borrowed.

First impression, then: a painfully slow and formally clumsy (too many close-ups among other things) piece of self-indulgent cinema. I might give it a second try later, though.