In a Chinese mountain village the daily routine of three sisters begins. Living unsupervised in an old house, the young girls barely manage to feed themselves and spend their days at hard labor. Their father finally returns but their quality of life gets no better. The girls’ dull, difficult life unfolds like a fiction film. The girls are young but one cannot find any cuteness or innocence in them. It is agonizing to hear relatives who take care of the girls speak of abject poverty and to witness how it separates a family. Wang Bing is one of China’s finest and most fearless documentary filmmakers. But his work sits on a delicate precipice between fiction and documentary, regularly portraying very realistic but simultaneously dramatic stories. <Three Sisters> is no exception. The girls’ repetitive routine and the narrative of the poor village around them are captured by the camera, following them closely and relentlessly, delivering a poignant drama with the honesty of a documentary. (CHO Young-jung)