Minari

Released 19 MARCH

It’s obvious but important to note that Lee Isaac Chung’s is as American a film as it gets. Set in the 1980s, on the cusp of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it is the autobiographical story of a Korean-American family adjusting to life in Arkansas after moving there from the West Coast. It is, above all else, a story of faith and resilience, but also resistance to cultural and social assimilation. Like the minari plants of the title, which are able to thrive on even the most unlikely terrain, the members of the family at the film’s centre grit their teeth and start again. The struggle of rebuilding from the ground up is embodied by the virgin soil on the tract