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Yet the two films could not be more different.
"Parasite," which made history in 2020 by becoming the first
film in a foreign language to win a best picture Oscar, is a
dark satire about class and contemporary society in South Korea.
"Minari," now in U.S. movie theaters and arriving in South Korea
in March, is a tender, quintessentially American story about an
immigrant family in the 1980s trying to better themselves by
starting a farm in Arkansas. Unlike "Parasite," it was
conceived, produced and filmed in the United States.
"They speak Korean and it's about a family and there's some
Korean culture involved, but I think this film speaks a lot to
what America is. It contains a lot of people doing many
different things, many different walks of life, and in that way
it's quite different from 'Parasite'," said director Lee Isaac
Chung.
An intensely personal story, the film is based partly on Chung's
own life as a boy growing up in Arkansas, but there is no satire
and barely any mention of racism. Instead the film, which has
already won multiple awards nominations, including the Golden
Globes, has been widely embraced for its universal humanity.
Nominations for the Oscars have not yet been announced.
Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, who plays the father, said he
was terrified at taking on the role.
"It was scary to approach my father's generation on a level that
isn't just caricature but really just trying to get into their
humanity. It opened my own eyes into the ways in which I might
misunderstand my own father and that generation as well," Yeun
said.
Yeun, best known for his TV role in "The Walking Dead," is
joined by Korean actors Yeri Han as his stressed wife and Yuh-
Jung Youn as his idiosyncratic mother in-law, who all live
together in a sweltering trailer in a remote and unforgiving
field.
Chung said the warm response to the film so far has been more
than he hoped for.
"I do feel hopeful and glad that it seems like audiences are
willing to read subtitles, and to watch films that don't reflect
their own experiences," he said. "It seems like they identify
with what they're seeing, and they're looking more to this
shared humanity."
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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