A Movie Director Lee Isaac Chung Passes On Their Own Language To The Next Generation

Lee Isaac Chung relied on childhood memories for his semi-autobiographical film “Minari”

During the 2021 Golden Globes Sunday night, “Minari” was awarded best motion picture – a foreign language. Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, stars Steven Yeun as an ambitious South Korean immigrant named Jacob Yi who moves his family from the city life in California to the middle-of-nowhere in Arkansas, to pursue his passion of opening and operating a farm.

“Most of the things in the film are based on something,” Chung said. “I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family’s arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother’s shock at learning that this would be our new home. I recalled the smell of freshly plowed soil and the way the color of it pleased my father. I remembered the creek where I threw rocks at snakes while my grandmother planted a Korean vegetable that grew without effort.”

“Minari is about a family. It’s a family trying to learn how to speak a language of its own. It goes deeper than any American language and any foreign language. It’s a language of the heart, and I’m trying to learn it myself and to pass it on, and I hope we’ll all learn how to speak this language of love to each other, especially this year. God bless you all, and thank you.”