'Minari' Broke New Ground for Storytellers of Color, But Creatives Don't Want to Be Pigeonholed hollywoodreporter.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hollywoodreporter.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Photographed by Raul Romo
by Inkoo Kang
April 14, 2021, 6:00am PDT
The Oscar-nominated film navigates the immigrant American journey, but writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, producer Christina Oh and Steven Yeun emphasize its themes are broader than the Asian American experience: "We were just trying to tell something honest."
It was a church scene that first caught producer Christina Oh's attention when she was introduced to the
Minariscript in February 2019 by the film's future star, Steven Yeun. In the handful of pages that he showed her, a white girl of primary-school age approaches Anne (Noel Kate Cho), the young daughter of a Korean American family that has just moved from California to rural Arkansas to chase a homesteading dream. It's the Yi family's first Sunday at a white church, and everyone means well, even if they don't know how to show it. "Can you stop me if I say something in your language?" the white girl asks Anne by the post-service buffet. Out comes a stream of gibberish — "chinga-chinga-chon, chama-chama-choo" — that Anne politely endures, then indulges. It's a kind of racism that's still underdiscussed — accidental, almost benign, yet pervasive and unmistakable — and writer-director Lee Isaac Chung's acuity and generosity struck Oh as something different. "It was a new depiction of our existence among white people," she recalls thinking. "It was done in a way that didn't villainize anyone."