Slideshow
MINARI
Now Streaming through Sunday, April 25
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY LEE ISAAC CHUNG
WINNER of both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, 2020 Sundance Film Festival
WINNER of the 2021 Golden Globe® award for Best Picture – Foreign Language
NOMINATED FOR SIX ACADEMY AWARDS®!
Best Picture; Best Director; Best Original Screenplay; Best Actor (Steven Yeun);
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Yuh-jung Youn); Best Original Score (Emile Mosseri)
VIRTUAL CINEMA EXCLUSIVE
Rental includes panel discussion with the director and cast
Both minimal and nuanced, MINARI tells the story of a Korean American family of four who relocate from CA to the arid Arkansan Ozarks, hoping to quit low-paying factory work for independent farming. The rare film whose universality emerges from its authentic cultural specificity—the movie stars Steven Yeun (BURNING) as an insistently optimistic dad, coping with his wife’s horror at living in the middle of nowhere in a double-wide trailer. Joined by a quirky ungrandmotherly grandma, their world of snakes, tornadoes, culturally dense white folks, fires, and health scares threatens to turn into melodrama. But director Lee Isaac Chung, drawing on personal experience, limns their lives too finely for false impositions to prevail. David Ehrlich in IndieWire calls the film an “immaculate memory play … always poignantly in flux between shared recollections of the past and conflicting visions of the future. A raw and vividly remembered story of … a family assimilating into a country, but also the story of a man assimilating into his family.”
USA 2020 115 MINS. IN ENGLISH AND KOREAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES A24 FILMS
Virtual Cinema program supported by the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation.
Reviews
“One of the most impeccably crafted films of the year, beautiful on top of being smart and funny as hell, with something to say about being a child, a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, an immigrant, a laborer, a husband, a wife. It’s a movie made in America by an American that tells the most American of stories.”
– Dana Stevens, Slate
“A symphony of grace notes, a wonderful ensemble cast and a gentle sense of looking back at the past with the benefit of wisdom.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone
“MINARI solicits well-earned tears and turns on a profound crisis that can only be solved when the family pulls together, unity that works as a welcome and, in its underlying optimism, deeply moving metaphor.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times