Golden Globe Award-winning film ‘Minari’: What Makes Us Strong, What Makes a Home?
A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to an Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream.
The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Cast: Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho, and Yuh-Jung Youn
Minari and Ties to the Christian Faith
According to Chung, the filmmaker of “Minari, in a recent interview with Christian Post, the Christian character in the movie is based on a real person who had a lasting impact on his family’s life.
“He’s based on someone from my real life. He was a Pentecostal man who worked on our farm. The sense I got with him, you see it in Scripture, it’s the foolish who shamed the wise many times; I kind of felt that way with him,” Chung told CP in an interview (watch below).
“He was a fool for Christ and he taught us a lot about what it means to love somebody,” he added. “There are people in the town that would make fun of him, to be honest. But yet, he became our friend, and he was the first guest we had in our house and he really welcomed us into that community.
“I always felt like, there’s something in that that speaks to the Christian faith, the sort of connection that we’re supposed to be making with people on the margins, and really welcoming in strangers and all these different elements of the faith that I respond to,” he said.
“I wanted to show him in this way, this counterintuitive way. Because also, we see so many images of white Christians in the south, and they’re treated with a lot of caricatures,” he continued. “So I thought, it’s interesting if we can have this character in the film who feels like that at the beginning, but then you really realize that he’s a fully fleshed out more complex human being than we were immediately expecting.”
Catch Minari on-demand now at https://screeningroom.a24films.com.
