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â¶ï¸ Zana is available to stream on BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema and other digital platforms, and to buy on DVD.
A woman leads a placid cow through a drowsy summer meadow; the air thrums with clean life as they pick their way down to a stream. But when they get there, the water is foul: a bovine corpse is rotting in the mud. The woman recoils, turning back towards the living cow she has been leading. But sheâs gone â thereâs only lush summer air where the cow used to be. Most chillingly of all, the woman doesnât seem particularly surprised.Â
★★★★★
DESERVEDLY nominated for six Academy Awards, you can’t help but be swept away by this exquisitely tender and heartfelt story of a Korean-US family in pursuit of the American Dream in 1980s Arkansas.
Though totally fictional, writer-director Lee Isaac Chung was inspired by his own family and provides a fresh new take on the immigrant tale. It is a touching love letter to his own parents and their tenacity to forge a new life in the US and to provide their children with a more promising future.
The film, the produced by Brad Pitt and named after a peppery Korean herb, follows the pressures that a Korean family of four face as they move from California to a small farm in rural Arkansas and how their lives are upended with the arrival of the maternal grandmother (played superbly by Yuh-Jung Youn).