Lemon Tree and Treeless Mountain open at the Angelika Film Center on May 29. (www.angelikafilmcenter.com)

From the great films that have come out of Israel and Palestine in recent years (among them Broken Wings and Paradise Now), it seems that it is impossible to make a movie set in that war-torn country that isn’t innately political. What makes these such effective political films, however, is that their politics are not extracted from the day-to-day. The Israeli-Palestinian situation seems so intertwined with ordinary life – with concepts of neighbor and work – that these films make politicians’ talk of peace processes and two-state solutions seem almost ridiculous.

Writer-director Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree (Etz Limon) goes after this intrinsic disconnect between the talk of politics and the political reality very directly. Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass) lives a simple life tending a lemon grove that happens to be near the border of Israel and the West Bank. A widow and mother of two children who have moved away, the Palestinian Salma scrapes by a poor, lyrical existence with her gardener until the Israeli defense minster Israel Navon (Doron Tavory) happens to move into an upscale housing development that backs up to Salma’s lemon grove. The minister brings the secret service with him, who secure the parameter of the home, building a watch tower in the lemon grove and surrounding it with fence and barbed wire. Then they decide that the grove itself poses a security risk and decide to chop it down: militants could hide among the trees. Though Salma only earns a meager living off the fruit, the lemon grove, which was planted and left to her by her father, is her only means to survive and her only connection to her past and her family. Salma finds a lawyer and tries to take on the State of Israel in the courts.

The simple conceit is a touchstone that digs into a variety of knotted social situations. Salma faces the impossibility of a Palestinian taking on the Israeli justice system. At the same time this brazen, courageous woman is ostracized by her own patriarchal community. A burgeoning love for her young lawyer is stymied by a sense of duty to her deceased husband and his ever-present glare from an awkward photograph of him hanging in the home – not to mention bullying leaders of the local Palestinian community. Parallel to Salma’s story, Riklis shows the philandering Navon’s teetering relationship with his wife Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael). Both Mira and Salma are abandoned, self-reliant women, and Mira seems to understand this. She sympathizes with and admires Salma’s quest to protect her lemon grove. It places the Israeli wife in an awkward moral situation.

Lipaz-Michel and Abbass both turn in tremendous performances. Abbass is stunningly beautiful, possessing a poised ferocity of spirit – her internal angst always bubbling to the surface in small vulnerable moments before her stony veneer reclaims the character. She draws us into her anguish.

Anguish emerges as the only possible resolution to Salma’s quest for justice. The image of the lemon tree persists – its sour fruit, its unquenchable thirst. In the land of Solomon, justice by division seems naïve and cruel when the dispute involves earth that is home to a tangled mess of aged-roots.

T

he camera in So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain rarely gets very far from the faces of its characters. The film about two young girls abandoned to relatives by their mother, remains intensely personal throughout – we rarely see action outside the periphery of the young protagonists. It seems a suitable approach to a film about childhood anxiety. The camera captures the immediacy of young life, and when we do look way, Kim’s eye catches beautiful landscape scenes – a golden sunset over the Korean countryside, clouds moving in front of the sun. The shots are what the children notice, what distracts them – scenes of escape.

If the great human story of the last hundred years is the migration from country to city, Bin (Soo-ah Lee) and Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) take that trip in reverse. Treeless Mountain begins in a crapped apartment block in Seoul. There are small moments of tenderness between Jin and her mother (Soo Ah Lee), which makes it hard to understand why her mother soon takes the two children to live with their alcoholic “Big Aunt” (Mi-hyang Kim) in a shanty suburb on the outskirts of the city. Their mother explains she is going to look for her husband, the girl’s father, and she gives them a pink, plastic piggy bank and promises that when it is filled, she will return. It is never quite clear if mom is telling the truth, what the marriage situation is, or why she needs to abandon her children to the oppressive Big Aunt in order to chase down their father. So Young Kim never leaves the realm of the child, instead focusing on the two girls’ hope that if they fill up the piggy bank quickly, their mother will return. Even when Big Aunt reads a letter from their mother instructing her to bring the children to their grandparent’s farm, it is unclear whether this is their mother’s wish or if Big Aunt is trying to get rid of the children.

By withholding all this information, So Yong Kim leaves the viewer in a similar state of the child. The adult world, which controls the circumstances of the film, is outside of our understanding. Only small encounters seem real – the girls plant a bare branch on a dirt hill, catch and sell roasted grasshoppers, and befriend a neighbor boy with Down Syndrome and a kind mother. Later, they watch their grandmother stoke a fire, peel potatoes, and wash clothes. Treeless Mountain is a collection of many little moments which allow director So Yong Kim to extract a film of great poetry and beauty from a story of sadness and abuse. With a mother abandoning her children, a whole other film is possible here – one about families, poverty, and advocacy agendas. But Treeless Mountain is about the lyricism of childhood - a celebration of the resilience of the young imagination.