Home Christian News Oscar Nominee Minari Spotlights Korean American Faith and the Role of the...

Oscar Nominee Minari Spotlights Korean American Faith and the Role of the Church

Minari

(RNS) — So much about the Oscar-nominated film Minari felt familiar to Jessica Min Chang.

“It shows scenes, conversations and household items that almost any Korean American immigrant family of a similar era will resonate with at some point,” said Chang, chief advancement and partnerships officer at The Field School in Chicago.

There’s the way the Yi family, its main characters, switch seamlessly between speaking English and Korean.

There’s also the film’s portrayal of religion, echoing the centrality of faith for many Korean Americans and their experiences of church, both the community found in the Korean American church and the shaky welcome in majority-white churches.

“For many Korean American immigrants, the church has been a central place for community,” said Chang, whose parents led a Korean American church when she was growing up in California.

“ Minari ” tells the story of the Yi family, a Korean American family that moves to an Arkansas farm, depicted as a kind of Eden, in search of the American dream. Along the way, they interact with a white, charismatic Christian farmworker and seek connection at a white, rural church.

America Magazine, a Catholic publication, described “ Minari ” as a “grounded, lightly comedic portrayal of the many varieties of American Christianity, without any preachiness, neither accepting nor rejecting the forms of faith on offer.”

The film is written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung and loosely based on his upbringing in Lincoln, Arkansas, where, he told NPR, his parents would drop off Chung and his sister at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln to make friends and learn English.

Chung’s own faith comes out in the film in “the way that I choose to look at people,” he said during a Q&A for Fuller Seminary’s Brehm Center in Pasadena, California. For him, that meant avoiding caricatures of southern Christians and showing all the characters “in their humanity.”

“I feel like a lot of our spirituality is worked out in our relationships with other people and the way we choose to look at other people,” the filmmaker said.

The film premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize and the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award. It also won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film earlier this year and is nominated for six Oscars this weekend (April 25), including best picture, best director for Chung and best actor for Steven Yeun for his portrayal of Jacob, the patriarch of the family, who — like his biblical namesake — wrestles with God.

Chang saw a screening of “Minari” late last year, watching it back to back with another Oscar nominee, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which tells the story of a white Yale Law School student’s Appalachian family.

She was struck by how both films told deeply American stories.

“Minari,” though, is distinctly Korean American and “cathartic for Korean Americans in that we get to experience glimpses of our memories on screen in a Korean American way,” she said. For non-Korean Americans, she added, it offers an opportunity to see one family’s story presented “with a level of intimacy and nuance that’s usually reserved for other stories.”

The church plays an important role in that story, not just for the Yi family in the film, but for generations of Korean Americans.

“The Korean American church was a source of support, finding resources and experiencing connection and camaraderie,” Chang said.

At her parents’ church, she said, that looked like shared meals after every Sunday service. She remembers congregants gathering for prayer at 5 a.m. and her father preaching seven times a week.

“They sought the Lord because it was so hard. They kind of clung to their hope,” she said.

The Korean American church boomed after 1965, according to Daniel D. Lee, academic dean for Fuller’s Center for Asian American Theology and Ministry and assistant professor of theology and Asian American studies. But, he said, it actually has a much longer history, with Korean American churches in Hawaii and California dating back to 1903.