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%.
Chung s semi-autobiographical film follows a Korean American father who moves his family to a farm in rural Arkansas. Minari began one afternoon when Chung wrote down 80 childhood memories.
Courtesy Of A24/Josh Ethan Johnson
PROMISED LAND A family tries to wring a living from a rural Arkansas farm in Chung s evocative autobiographical drama. Our streaming entertainment options are overwhelming and not always easy to sort through. Right now, the 2020 films that thrilled festival audiences and garnered award nominations are still trickling onto streaming platforms and into local theaters. Two of those movies are celebrations of America its roads, its rural heartland, its people with bittersweet modern twists. In the excellent
Nomadland (Essex Cinemas, Savoy Theater, Hulu), which I wrote about in December, Frances McDormand plays a woman who embraces an itinerant life in her van after her factory town goes kaput. In writer-director Lee Isaac Chung s