Treeless Mountain has been on the Asian American festival circuit last year and this year including the closing night film for the 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and 2009 Chicago Asian American Showcase as well as the centerpiece film for the 2009 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Now it’s available on DVD. Here’s the synopsis:

When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, six year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are left to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother’s promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimate to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed young girls eagerly anticipate their mother’s homecoming. But when the bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, Big Aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children. Taken to live on their grandparents’ farm, it is here that Jin comes to learn the importance of family bonds in this beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking second feature from So Yong Kim, the acclaimed director of IN BETWEEN DAYS.

Treeless Mountain is director So Yong Kim’s second feature film. The script received support from the Cannes L’Atelier Program, the Sundance Institute’s Writers and Directors Labs, and the Pusan Promotional Program. It is inspired by events from the director’s early childhood in Pusan, Korea. Her mother divorced her father and left her with the grandparents on a rice farm. Her mother immigrated to America in order to find a better life for herself and to build a future for her children. At the time of these events, So Yong Kim was too young to understand and her mother did not tell her what was happening. The director began writing the film to search for certain lost memories from this period of her life and also as a letter to her mother.

Buy Treeless Mountain on DVD at Amazon.

Treeless Mountain Trailer