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%.