The Way Home

Seven-year-old Sang-woo, raised in Seoul, is left in a mountain village with a grandmother he has never met while his mother looks for work. She cannot speak, cannot read or write, and can give him none of the things he wants. He treats her with hostility at first. Lee Jeong-hyang wrote and directed. Kim Eul-boon, who plays the grandmother, was not a professional. The director found her by searching through villages; she had never been to a cinema and faced a camera for the first time here. The film uses almost no music and its plot is minimal: a search for batteries, a chicken dinner, a pair of wool gloves. The dramatic weight rests entirely on those small exchanges. It was a major audience success in South Korea, among the box office records of its period, and found unexpectedly wide distribution abroad. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet family films and stories across generations. Who it is not for: anyone after incident and pace; the film deliberately tells almost nothing.