House of Hummingbird

Unremarkable 14-year-old Eun-hee (Jihu Park) goes about life as a hummingbird searching for sweetness wherever she may find it. Along the way, she timidly experiments with her emerging sexuality, first with a boy from another school, and later with a shy female classmate.

Eun-hee gets along mostly without any supervision from her parents, who work long hours in their rice cake shop. Her struggling middle-class family comes together every night at the dinner table, where Eun-hee remains mostly quiet alongside her favored, abusive older brother and her absent-minded sister. Her unnoticed existence started changing when a new after-school teacher, Young-ji (Saebyuk Kim), steps in. Soon they develop a friendship as tender as unlikely, with great significance for both of them.

House of Hummingbird is a cliché-free coming-of-age drama that combines the universal theme of teenage uncertainty and insecurity with a specific look at the fast-modernizing South-Korea of the 1990s. In particular, the film explores the role of girls and young women, illustrated by the way Eun-hee’s parents favor her older brother, oftentimes ignoring physical and psychological abuse. First-time director Kim Bora, who also wrote the script, infuses the narrative with the prosaic rhythm of everyday life, resulting in a movie that seems to wander aimlessly before a sense of direction emerges.

Bora Kim (b. 1981) is a director from South Korea. She studied film at the Dongguk University in her home country, and later at the Columbia University in the US. House of Hummingbird is her first feature, and has become something of a sensation after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Tribeca, and Busan.