Synopsis
 When the mother finds it increasingly difficult to make a living, she sends her two daughters to their aunt’s home away from the city. However, the aunt ignores the two sisters, drinking away and lamenting of her own situation. Separated from their mother and ignored by their aunt, the two sisters are once again sent from one place to another, this time to their grandmother’s home in the countryside. But the appearance of the young sisters is always a burden to the relatives. Where could these young girls find their home?
 
 Program Note
 Due to reasons that they could not comprehend, 6-year-old Jin and her younger sister Bin are left at their relatives’ care. Their mother could no longer take care of the household on her own, so she must sell the apartment in which the family lived and send the two sisters away to an aunt living in the rural area. But the aunt always needs the help of alcohol, and does not have the leisure to tend to the two girls. From their aunt’s, Jin and Bin are sent to their grandmother living in the countryside. The two girls’ caretaker shifts from their mother to their aunt, finally to their grandmother; these three women all have their own burdens to bear in their difficult lives. Treeless Mountain traces in a composed manner how the increasingly unbearable weight of life falls onto the shoulders of women in the family. What is noticeable is that the women are too tired and wasted to take care of the weak members of the family. In this film, the “mistresses of caretaking” reveal their exhausted interiority. The girls’ mother promised to return when the piggy bank is full, but she is unable to keep the promise. Instead of waiting for their mother at the bus stop, the two girls plant a tree on a low hill. Would this tree live and grow many green leaves? But the story of Jin and Bin are not the same as that of “Hensel and Gretel”, nor as that of “Princess Bari”. They were not abandoned by their parents; they were sent to others’ care. The current situation in which mothers cannot help but send their children away to others’ care asks for a more complex political-economic understanding (girls that cannot be sent away to others’ care run away from home, achieving independence “in their own ways.”). The film guides the viewers to feel and contemplate upon ecology and economy in a gendered perspective. (KIM Young-ok)