Hers is a 2017 film from Mongolia directed by Galbayar Dashkhuu.
The film centers around a fifty-something woman who is never named. Many years ago her family was more prosperous, but a long time ago her husband lost all the family's money in a bank collapse and they were ruined. The husband disappeared. For some 15 years the woman and her two daughters have been eking out a precarious existence operating in, and living in, a corner kiosk the size of a medium van. Daughters Barchimeg and Ariunaa sleep together in a narrow cot while Mom sleeps behind the counter, in a kiosk without running water or heat in the brutal Mongolian winters.
This meager living is destroyed when, without warning, and in fact while the three women are still inside the kiosk, it is lifted onto a tow truck and hauled off to a junkyard. Living in the kiosk was bad enough but now Mom, Barchimeg, and Ariunaa are left homeless, sleeping in a train station. Mom begins pestering the halls of government, demanding the return of her kiosk. When that doesn't work, she begins holding vigil at the front door of the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar's personal residence.
Tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Barchimeg says that she is embarrassed to tell other people where she lives, how their poverty has made it hard for her to complete her schooling. After the kiosk is hauled away and the family is left homeless, Mom throws Barchimeg's complaints back in her face.
- Determinator: How determined is Mom to get her humble little kiosk back? She goes all over the city accosting every Obstructive Bureaucrat involved. But how determined is she really? She visits the mayor's office, day after day. Is she really determined, though? Well, she starts standing vigil outside the mayor's house. But is she really determined? She's so determined that she refuses to move even when the mooks sent by the mayor's weaselly aide set fire to the cardboard box she's sitting under.
- Disappeared Dad: At some point many years ago, after he lost all their money, the father disappeared. The ending reveals that Dad is still around, and while he's too ashamed to meet them again, he does arrange for them to get documents proving that they have legal title to that spot.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After all that, after their kiosk was hauled away with them in it, after they spent days on end chasing after government bureaucrats, after Mom was assaulted by mooks, after the daughters were Mistaken For Prostitutes and arrested, after Mom's cardboard box was set on fire with her inside, and oh, after she had a heart attack, they finally get their kiosk back. Not only that, the end reveals that, despite now having to compete with a rival kiosk, they have saved enough money to get an apartment.
- Establishing Character Moment: In Mom's first scene she is shown chasing a guy named Khurelee all the way up the stairs of an apartment building and to the roof, because he hasn't paid her for some stuff he bought on credit. She is established as a Determinator.
- The Faceless: The father is The Ghost for most of the movie, as the family wonders where he is and blames him for abandoning them. He pops up in the end, arranging for his wife to get the deed to that little plot of land, but he still isn't seen. He's heard in voiceover, and from the inside of a car while he talks to someone on the outside. When he finally appears onscreen near the end and meets Barchimeg, he's still shown from a distance and with his back to the camera.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: The family once lived in an apartment, but after Dad lost all their money and disappeared, Mom and the two daughters were left scraping by and living in a kiosk, which is really a glorified storage shed.
- A Friend in Need: The people of the neighborhood rally to the support of Mom and her family after Mom has a heart attack, donating food and money as the daughters hold vigil in mom's sickroom.
- Kitchen Sink Drama: Three Ulaanbaatar women struggle to avoid homelessness and hold on to their humble little kiosk.
- Mistaken for Prostitute: At one point the daughters, Barchimeg and Ariunaa, get a room in a flophouse hotel, only to be arrested in a police sting and charged with prostitution.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: All of them. Mom makes the round of officials only for everyone, from the hauling company or from the health inspector or from the police, to tell her that it wasn't their decision and there's nothing they can do. The clerk outside the mayor's office is openly insolent, and when Mom finally waylays the mayor in person, he blows her off. Only when she starts holding vigil outside his front door does he finally take action on her behalf.
- Orbital Shot: The family has gotten an apartment, only for the building to start shaking with an earthquake. The camera orbits around the three women as they shriek in terror. Then it's revealed to be Mom's dream, as she wakes up to realize that the shaking is because the kiosk is being hauled up onto a flatbed truck.
- Rooftop Confrontation: An unusual one in the opening scene, not between a gun-toting hero and a villain, but between Mom and the deadbeat that she is trying to make pay his bill. He distracts her by leaving his coat behind a vent and escapes downstairs.
- Tempting Fate: After his first in-person encounter with Mom, the mayor grouses about all the people who bother him with their problems, saying that they'll go on hunger strikes or "they will just stand in front of the government house." Moments after this his limo delivers him home, where he finds that Mom isn't standing in front of the governor's house, she's sitting in front of his private residence.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage of various clerks at the mayor's reception desk blowing off Mom by saying that she'll be received "tomorrow", for day after day after day, until Mom finally snaps.
