Minari

In 2020, a movie about a Korean family farming a patch of Arkansas dirt won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance, then spent a year turning into something bigger than a festival favorite. Minari opened in U.S. theaters on December 11, 2020, through A24, and by the time the Oscars rolled around it had earned six nominations and one historic win. The film is director Lee Isaac Chung's semi-autobiographical account of his own childhood, made for roughly $2 million and shot in Oklahoma standing in for Arkansas.

Steven Yeun plays Jacob Yi, a Korean immigrant who moves his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) and their two children from California to the rural South so he can grow Korean produce for a market nobody else is serving. The tension is simple and bottomless: Jacob wants to build something, Monica wants to keep the family safe. Youn Yuh-jung, a veteran of Korean film and television, plays Monica's mother Soonja, who arrives from Korea to help with the kids and promptly steals the movie. Alan Kim plays David, the boy with a heart murmur who becomes her sparring partner.

The film's title comes from a Korean water celery that grows stubbornly in wet ground. Chung uses it as the quiet center of a story about what it takes to put down roots in a country that does not always make room for you. Critics responded with near-universal praise, and the film's awards run, including Youn's Best Supporting Actress Oscar, made it a reference point in conversations about Asian American representation on screen. [edit]

A used truck pulls a trailer down a two-lane Arkansas road in the early 1980s, and Jacob Yi is at the wheel. He has bought fifty acres of farmland sight unseen, or close to it, and he has brought his family from California to work it. Monica rides beside him with their son David and daughter Anne in back. When they arrive at the property, the house turns out to be a mobile home propped on cinder blocks in the middle of an empty field. Monica's face does the work of describing it.

Jacob spent years sexing chicks at a California hatchery. He knows plants and he knows how to work. His plan is to grow Korean vegetables, chili peppers and perilla and minari, and sell them to the Korean immigrants scattered across the South who currently drive hours for a taste of home. Monica wanted to stay in California. She wanted a hospital nearby, because David has a heart murmur and she has spent his whole life watching him. Jacob tells her the boy is fine. The argument does not end; it just moves to a different room.

Money is tight from the start. Monica takes a job at a chicken-sexing plant, the same kind of work Jacob left behind. Jacob hires Paul, a local man who speaks in tongues and douses for water with a forked stick, to help dig a well and work the land. Paul is strange and gentle and utterly without guile, and he becomes the closest thing Jacob has to a friend. The farm takes shape slowly. The well is dug. The seedlings go in. The children explore the woods and the creek and treat the whole place like a playground.

Monica's mother Soonja arrives from Korea to help with the kids. Jacob resents the extra mouth to feed. Monica sees her mother as the only thing holding the household together. Soonja is not the grandmother David expected. She plays cards, drinks Mountain Dew, watches wrestling on television, and has no interest in baking cookies. David, who has never met her, is embarrassed by her in the specific way children are embarrassed by old people who do not perform the role they are supposed to perform. They fight. She calls him a little rascal. He hides from her. Then, gradually, she teaches him to play cards and he teaches her about America, and something between them begins to soften.

The family attends a Korean church, where a fellow congregant mentions a Korean grocer in Oklahoma City who might buy Jacob's produce. Jacob makes the drive and comes back with a deal. It is the first real sign that the farm might work. It also pulls him further into his own head and further from Monica, who is spending her days at the plant and her nights in a trailer that does not feel like home. The middle of the film accumulates small crises: a drought, a well that runs dry, a fire that has to be put out, a trip to the city, a church service, a grandmother who is not as strong as she pretends to be. Through it all, the camera stays close to the children, and their perspective keeps the story from tipping into melodrama.

The minari grows in the wet ground near the creek. Soonja says it grows anywhere and is good for everyone. Jacob plants it because it is food, but the film keeps returning to it because it is also a way of describing the family: stubborn, adaptable, rooting in soil that was not meant for it. The story builds toward a harvest and a set of crises that will test whether the family can hold together, but the film's resolution is best experienced without prior knowledge.[edit]