"We have to learn to be useful", advice from father to son.
“Minari is a wonderful herb that can be used for everything: soup, kimchi…” explains the hilarious grandmother who plays Youn Yuh-jung in the film that bears the name of that plant, while she looks for a place near the river where it can germinate.
Minari it would be a bit like the parsley of all the sauces in the Korean version. An herb that is easy to plant, grows generously and provides a very unique flavor. A perfect metaphor for the family portrayed by Minari, the film in which the South Korean-American Lee Issac Chung shot of childhood and youth memories to reflect on the Asian immigrant reality and the trite American dream. If even those two words make sense today.
Surrounded by minari.
"I feel that the american dream is so different for each person who lives in this country, and we talk about it so much that I don't know what it means anymore, ”explains the director via Zoom. “If you ask me what the American dream is, I don't know. All I know is what, for me, this country does very well: create more equality and democracy, especially in a place that is so racially diverse. In Los Angeles, where I live and which is so diverse, in a year as difficult as this, families and communities are helping each other. I suppose that that is the dream that Martin Luther King was talking about, that is the dream that I want to talk about and the one that attracted my parents to the US.”
We are so accustomed, because of cinema and literature, to that dream, that ghost of ambitions being sought in cities, in cities of success, in New York, in Los Angeles, in Boston, that the determination of this father of family (played by Steven Yeun) in succeed by running a farm from scratch in the middle of the plains of the Ozarks, Arkansas, we are surprised. How he shocks his wife, how he shocks his children. It's the 80's. The marriage has been installed in the US for years, his children were born in California, from there they reach the heart of the country, to continue earning money as chicken sexers while he works day and night growing Korean products.
You've seen Steven Yeun in 'Okja' or 'The Walking Dead'.
After decades of banning Asian immigrants, the 1980s saw a boom in Chinese and Korean population arrivals. 30,000 South Koreans came to the US each year in that decade, is mentioned in the film. And Jacob, the father of this family, sees the business clearly. Although the earth does not make it so easy.
Minari's story is, in part, the story of Lee Isaac Chung. In many ways. His parents South Korean immigrants also moved them, his sister and him, From California to Arkansas following the father's rural dream. For him, little then, that country life, of freedom was pure fun. Even when in that corner of the country they were a racial and cultural oddity. But the film is also the pursuit of his own dream, that of being a film director. After years in the industry, several films of mixed and modest success, Chung was ready to give up, to throw in the towel, when he decided to follow the advice of Willa Cather: "He said that his work began when he stopped admiring others and began to remember."
Before (and now) all that was (and still is) the countryside.
Chung began to remember and those memories were transformed into this delicate story, very subtle, sensitive and tremendously luminous, camouflaged and inspired by those plains, those fertile lands of the immense Ozarks. This plateau (or mountains) of more than 120,000 km2 extends between Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri. The director grew up in Lincoln, Arkansas, and wanted to shoot as close as possible, but finally they found the perfect piece of land in nearby Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he placed the trailer or mobile home where the family stays, parents, two children and that grandmother recently arrived from Korea, loaded with spices and minari seeds, that wonderful herb that adapts and grows generously anywhere. Pure American dream.
The little family.