I won't bore you with fancy entertainment industry words such as cinematography, direction, etc. Treeless Mountain (named for the small branch of a tree the youngest, Bin, and her sister, Jin, "planted" on the top of a gravel/dirt pile in their aunt's neighborhood is an extremely slow slice of life movie. The tree branch was a metaphor for the sisters' plight.

Treeless Mountain isn't a feel-good movie.

There isn't any background music (bgm), very little interaction between the grown folks and the girls, and has an overall feeling of hopelessness about it as we're carried along by the girls daily survival, first under the "care" of the aunt, then by their grandparents in the country.