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In the blue waiting room of an orphanage sits a Kyrgyz woman in a traditional head scarf, while in a nearby dormitory a young boy is awakened and told his mother has finally come to pick him up. As mother and son stride across the playground together, the other children envy his luck. But there’s something inscrutable about the pair: Zhipara (a beautifully careworn Perizat Ermanbaeva) seems more grimly determined than overjoyed at this reunion, after an unexplained 10-year separation. And Uluk (Daniel Daiyerbekov) looks wary, his eyes those of an old man, set deep and sad in his little-boy face.

This is the quietly arresting beginning to Russian director Elizaveta Stishova’s Kyrgyzstan-set “Suleiman Mountain,” a mixture of sober, ethnographic study and high melodrama that compels even when it doesn’t quite convince. Perhaps it’s Stishova’s outsider point of view that places the film indefinably but...