A Korean-American family moves to rural Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm selling vegetables to the Korean immigrant community. Then the grandmother arrives from Korea and sets off a crisis. It tests if the American Dream and family love can exist together. Lee Isaac Chung's autobiographical film is about what immigrant parents sacrifice for their children's futures.
Minari is a 2020 drama film directed by Lee Isaac Chung. This breakdown covers 4 techniques (3 narrative and 1 cinematography), each with the scene where you can see it. If you like how it is made, Lady Bird uses several of the same techniques.
Drawing on the filmmaker's own life but keeping it at arm's length, often through a fictional stand-in. The result is precise and unsentimental, and it can question how memory flatters us.
How this film uses it
Chung puts himself into David, a small boy with a heart condition. David watches his parents' marriage strain under the pressures of immigration and ambition. Seeing the adults' conflict through a child's eyes makes it feel both innocent and morally serious.
Where to see it
David tasting the minari his grandmother has planted by the creek. The minari is the film's central symbol of an identity that is moved to new ground and survives. You come to it through a child's open pleasure.
Casting real people from the community being shown, such as workers and local residents, with no trained actors in those roles. Their looks and behavior feel true in a way acting can't copy.
How this film uses it
Yuh-Jung Youn, who plays the grandmother, is very much a professional actress. Around her are the natural performances of the child actors. The cast feels like a family, and the back-and-forth between the generations feels inherited.
Where to see it
David and his grandmother's changing relationship. The grandmother learns to be grandmotherly, and the boy learns what grandmothers are for.
Treating a small town as more than a setting. Its buildings, lighting and relationships show the community's values and limits, which shape what the characters can do and what gets destroyed.
How this film uses it
The Arkansas farm has flat horizons, a mobile home and a neighbor who speaks in tongues. It is a specific American place. The film shows its beauty and its strangeness without looking down on it or treating it as exotic.
Where to see it
The family's trailer surrounded by flat Arkansas farmland. You see the Korean-American family in a landscape that does not know them yet. That picture holds the film's central question.
Watching events from a measured distance with no swelling music, tear-jerking close-ups or showy camera moves. The film trusts what happens to carry the weight on its own.
How this film uses it
Chung never comments on the parents' choices or the strains in the marriage. The film just watches. It trusts you to read the silences between Jacob and Monica as a complicated negotiation between 2 people trying to survive the same dream in different ways.
Where to see it
Jacob and Monica eating in silence after another setback with the farm. The film simply watches, and it never adds music to tell you what the scene feels like.
Questions
Minari: quick answers
What filmmaking techniques does Minari use?
CineCode breaks down 4 techniques in Minari (2020): Autobiographical Distance, Non-Professional Cast Authenticity, Small Town as Moral Geography and Observational Restraint.
Who directed Minari?
Lee Isaac Chung directed Minari, released in 2020. CineCode also covers Twisters (2024).
What films are similar to Minari?
Films that share techniques with Minari include Lady Bird (2017), The Pianist (2002), Roma (2018), Boyhood (2014).
