A Korean family chases the American dream in the… | Little White Lies

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A Kore­an fam­i­ly chas­es the Amer­i­can dream in the Minari trailer

30 Sep 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

Four people in a grassy field, with a swing and trees in the background.
Four people in a grassy field, with a swing and trees in the background.
Lee Isaac Chung’s Sun­dance-dom­i­nat­ing dra­ma stars Steven Yeun and new­com­er Alan Kim.

Lee Isaac Chung emerged from this past January’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val the undis­put­ed vic­tor, hav­ing secured both the US Dra­mat­ic Grand Jury Prize as well as the US Dra­mat­ic Audi­ence Award for his ten­der immi­gra­tion epic Minari. And while the year that fol­lowed dealt sev­er­al obsta­cles to the film’s release – and, indeed, life in gen­er­al – it looks like this crit­i­cal dar­ling may soon come to the public.

Today brings the first trail­er for Minari, an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal look back on Chung’s boy­hood in rur­al Arkansas. When he was bare­ly a child, his fam­i­ly packed up every­thing they owned and left their home of South Korea to pur­sue the Amer­i­can dream on land they would cul­ti­vate themselves.

Steven Yeun por­trays Jacob, the father of the Yi house and a self-fash­ioned farmer with plans to raise robust crops on a mas­sive par­cel of arable ter­rain. Alan Kim plays Chung’s mini-me David, who finds him­self torn between pre­serv­ing his her­itage as a Kore­an and embrac­ing assim­i­la­tion as a bur­geon­ing Amer­i­can. He finds solace in his under­stand­ing moth­er (Han Ye-ri) and his eccen­tric grand­moth­er (Youn Yuh-jung), who help him nav­i­gate the new dimen­sions of his identity.

The trail­er puts Chung’s del­i­cate direc­tion on fine dis­play, as he con­trasts the pas­toral beau­ty of the coun­try­side with the quo­tid­i­an details of sleep­ing with grand­ma-smell. Han­nah Wood­head, our gal in Sun­dance, wrote of the film in her first-look review: It’s an affec­tion­ate, some­times heart­break­ing work about the mag­ic of fam­i­ly, and how all the quirks our loved ones poss­es, even if they may frus­trate us at times, shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Regret­tably, the trail­er doesn’t offer much in the way of a prospec­tive release date beyond Com­ing Soon,” which can’t come soon enough for our liking.

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