A year after ‘Parasite,’ Korean-language movie ‘Minari’ is talk of Hollywood
HOLLYWOOD: A year ater South Korean satire “Parasite” took Hollywood by storm, another Korean-language movie, “Minari,” is making waves during awards season.
Yet the two films could not be more different. “Parasite,” which made history in 2020 by becoming the first film in a foreign language to win a best picture Oscar, is a dark satire about class and contemporary society in South Korea.
“Minari,” now in US movie theatres and arriving in South Korea in March, is a tender, quintessentially American story about an immigrant family in the 1980s trying to beter themselves by starting a farm in Arkansas. Unlike “Parasite,” it was conceived, produced and filmed in the United States.
“They speak Korean and it is about a family and there’s some Korean culture involved, but I think this film speaks a lot to what America is. It contains a lot of people doing many different things, many different walks of life, and in that way it’s quite different from ‘Parasite’,” said director Lee Isaac Chung.
An intensely personal story, the film is based partly on Chung’s own life as a boy growing up in Arkansas, but there is no satire and barely any mention of racism. Instead the film, which has already won multiple awards nominations, including the Golden Globes, has been widely embraced for its universal humanity. Nominations for the Oscars have not yet been announced.
Korean-american actor Steven Yeun, who plays the father, said he was terrified at taking on the role.
“It was scary to approach my father’s generation on a level that isn’t just caricature but really just trying to get into their humanity. It opened my own eyes into the ways in which I might misunderstand my own father and that generation as well,” Yeun said.
Yeun, best known for his TV role in “The Walking Dead,” is joined by Korean actors Yeri Han as his stressed wife and Yuh- Jung Youn as his idiosyncratic mother in-law, who all live together in a sweltering trailer in a remote and unforgiving field.
Chung said the warm response to the film so far has been more than he hoped for.
“I do feel hopeful and glad that it seems like audiences are willing to read subtitles, and to watch films that don’t reflect their own experiences,” he said. “It seems like they identify with what they’re seeing, and they’re looking more to this shared humanity.”
Lee Isaac Chung is an American film director and screenwriter. His debut feature “Munyurangabo” (2007) was an Official Selection at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The first narrative feature film in the Kinyarwanda language, the film was an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Busan International Film Festival. He also directed the feature films “Lucky Life” (2010) and “Abigail Harm” (2012).
Chung was born October 19, 1978, in Denver, Colorado, and grew up on a small farm in rural Lincoln, Arkansas. His family comes from South Korea. He atended Yale University to study Biology. At Yale, with exposure to world cinema in his senior year, he dropped his plans for medical school to pursue filmmaking.
His directorial debut, the Rwanda-set Munyurangabo, premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (Official Selection: Un Certain Regard) to great acclaim. A collaboration with students at an international relief base in Kigali and an intimate story about the friendship between two boys in the atermath of the Rwandan genocide.
According to The New York Times, prior to the making of “Munyurangabo,” Chung’s wife Valerie, an art therapist, had travelled to Rwanda as a volunteer to work with those affected by the 1994 genocide.
At her urging, Chung accompanied her to Rwanda and volunteered to teach a filmmaking class at a relief base in Kigali in the summer of 2006. Sensing an opportunity to present the contemporary reality of Rwanda and to provide his students with practical film training, Chung arrived with a nine-page outline which he had writen with the help of old friend (and the film’s eventual co-producer and co-writer) Samuel Gray Anderson. Chung shot “Munyurangabo” over 11 days, working with a team of nonprofessional actors Chung found through local orphanages and his students as crew members.