From left, Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han and Noel Cho in "Minari" (Courtesy of A24/Josh Ethan Johnson)
Should a movie set entirely in rural Arkansas, directed by an American director and filmed in the United States count as a foreign movie or an American one? When "Minari," a semiautobiographical film directed by Lee Isaac Chung, won the Golden Globes' best foreign language film in February 2021 because the majority of the movie's dialogue is in Korean, the practice of categorizing non-English languages as "foreign" was once again contested.
Questions about Asian American identity and its seemingly perpetual otherness haunt the public imagination in a year where anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States have risen nearly 150%.