Minari



This is a family drama about a Korean immigrant family in the 1980s in Arkansas. It is mostly in Korean, and its mix of that language and American helps demonstrate the isolation of the immigrant experience. Jacob (Steven Yeun) takes his wife Monica (Yeri Han) and his two children from California to a patch of land which he plans to farm to supply the market for Korean ingredients.

The film is Academy Award nominated for Best Picture in a year of Streaming movies, and it only seems a few years ago that the Oscars were not at all diverse and criticised heavily for it. Minari (the word is a Korean herb) is a small drama which places the viewer right in a family—and the outside world, the wider State and America itself seem completely beyond any interest. There’s hardly any reference at all to the era: it’s all in the substandard accommodation that’s the last thing Monica wanted for herself or her children. The younger boy has a heart problem, and when the Grandmother (Monica’s mother) arrive from Korea it’s an additional cause of conflict. Soonja (Yu-Jung Youn) is not a conventional Grandmother, favouring TV wrestling and card playing to baking cookies…

There’s a strand of faith versus proof in the film: there’s a Christian evangelist who helps Jacob out after Jacob has already rejected a water-diviner’s assistance in locating a point to sink a well and irrigate his homestead. As the story goes along there’s a constant clash between that which can and cannot be proven. The view of life from the point of view of a child: from forming relationships with family and friends, and dealing with what’s apparently the strangeness of the world—it all seems universal and not restricted to the society. This is about immigrants integrating with American society and it’s joyfully realised.


Minari is a great movie, written from the heart and performed with touching reality by adults and children alike. It feels as though as many stories of immigration and integration are needed today, but this is a film about so much more than that. 

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