In Between Days 2006

“As the title suggests, the terrain of So Yong Kim’s In Between Days – the best film in the [Sundance] dramatic competition – is the ghost world of teenage alienation. The coming-of-age mopefest is a Sundance staple, but the first-time Korean American director’s watchful, intelligent minimalism modestly reanimates the genre. Recently arrived from Korea, Aimie (a wonderfully ingenuous performance by Ji-seon Kim) lives with her single mother in a bleak Toronto housing block, sending video diaries to the father who left them, unsure of how to handle a growing crush on her best friend... Painful, funny, unsentimental, perfectly measured in its ambiguities, it’s exemplary low-budget filmmaking, the rare DV movie with an assured visual style and a strong sense of place, moving between the claustrophobic sanctuary of a teenager’s pink bedroom and evocative in-between spaces like bus shelters and highway overpasses… Dismissed by Variety but praised by the NY Times, it won a ‘special’ prize for ‘independent vision’.” — Dennis Lim, Village Voice