In Between Days: Behold the Bold, Beautiful, Melancholy Stasis of Life!

Kino Intl.

Jiseon Kim strays from parental expectation.

Details

Runs Fri., Nov. 9–Sun., Nov. 11, at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 83 minutes.

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More About

• So Yong Kim
• Jiseon Kim
• Bokja Kim
• Fashion and Style

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In Between Days is instantly compelling. Dwarfed inside a fur-rimmed parka, a young girl trumps through snow, her silhouette framed by a wintry cityscape gone soft in twilight. The image freezes on a tableau of the skyline, and a voice begins to murmur: "Now, I'm going to school here," reads the subtitled Korean. "I've made lots of friends, Dad. My friends are white, black, Chinese, and Japanese, too. Isn't that amazing? And Mom's working hard too. So don't worry about us." "Here" is the unnamed North American metropolis where Aimie (Jiseon Kim), an introspective teenager, has recently emigrated from Korea, and there's plenty of reason to worry. Her mother (Bokja Kim) does indeed work hard, but only at two things: fixating on Aimie's education, and searching to replace the patriarch who left them. As for Aimie's friends, she appears to have exactly one, a handsome and listless boy named Tran (Taegu Andy Kang). Written and directed by So Yong Kim, a multimedia artist making her remarkable feature debut, In Between Days is the story of Aimie's faltering relationship with Tran, and of the melancholy stasis of a life neither here nor there, arrested in a state of threshold uncertainty. In other words, it's an intensely specific film about the universal yearnings of adolescence, rendered doubly resonant through the immigrant experience.