Despite it’s setting, period and the fact that most of the dialogue alternates between English and Korean, often in the same conversation, as it would in reality, Minari, named after a fast-growing herb popular in Korean cooking, and also known as the rather less enticing Japanese Waterdropwort, is probably the most accessible film so far by Koreran-American filmmaker Lee Issac Chung, his previous works, including 2007’s Munyurangabo, a Rwandan war story made in the local Kinyarwanda language, the terminal illness elegy Lucky Life (’10) and the highly eccentric Abigail Harm (’12), being largely restricted to some of the more esoteric film festivals.

With Minari, Chung has made a film which has reached a far wider audience while also winning more than ninety awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language, as well as six Oscar and five BAFTA nominations, based as it is on Chung’s own childhood living on a farm in rural Arkansas, although he is fast to emphasise that this is purely a fictional story, just based on his early circumstances, and his characters are largely inventions.

Set in the early 1980s, Minari is essentially the story of a family trying to secure their share of the American Dream, buying a piece of land and working it, trying to achieve security and happiness, the only difference from the films depicting the pioneers if the Western era, or those who took to the land in the Great Depression, as detailed in Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes Of Wrath, memorably filmed the following year by John Ford with Henry Fonda in the lead, being that the central family are the Yis, led by Jacob (Steven Yeun - Burning / TV’s The Walking Dead) and his wife Monica (Yeri Han - Sea Fog / Illang: The Wolf Brigade), starting a new life in rural Arkansas after leaving California, an idea Monica starts to reconsider after realising just how far away from any amenities, their son David needing his heart condition monitored at intervals, and also how basic their new living quarters are, a very American ‘double-wide’ mobile home on breeze blocks, basically a super-sized caravan, and about as aesthetically pleasing. Their circumstances show the chasm between Jacob’s dreams and the reality, the family having to make considerable sacrifices the make it come true, but they are sacrifices Jacob is willing to make, even when he and his wife are burdened by having to work at a local factory to bring in some money as they put their plans into action.

In order to make this work, Jacob has to employ a very eccentric local, hard-working religious zealot (the always reliable Will Patton - Meek’s Cutoff / 2018’s Halloween remake), whose depth of belief is regarded as out of the ordinary but, interestingly, never mocked, and also accept the arrival of Miniuca’s mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-Jung - Korean smash-hit The Housemaid / TV’s Sense8), who Jacob has never met, and is instantly disliked by grandson David for her rough and loud ways, raising the tension within the house ads Jacob realises that his idealistic ambitions may end in failure, although the device of having the Yis work at a chicken factory on the sexing line, where the females are the valuable ones, kept and reserved whereas the males, regarded as entirely surplus to requirements, are disposed of, often in a machine called a macerator and we take no responsibility if you can look that up on Google Images, is one of the few and very obvious devices in Chung’s script. What is fairly predictable is that the Yis are going to have to face another major challenge, and those who have been paying attention in the early scenes when the family move into the trailer, and realise just how basic some of the amenities are, will not be surprised when disaster strikes.

Minari achieved almost unanimous acclaim from the critics, led by IndieWire, saying ‘Gentle as the stream that flows through the Yi’s property, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving - and immensely lovable - immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other’ and Entertainment Weekly, finding ‘Minari works quietly and methodically, embracing its lush rural setting with striking glimpses of its characters, alone against vast and empty landscapes. Chung’s directing feels drawn from memory, the scattered and sparkling quality of recollections, carefully assembled. It’s perhaps why every second rings so true’. The Playlist believed ‘There is barely a manufactured minute in the film. Everything fits together organically and in a narrative film that is much harder to pull off than it sounds’, with Variety adding ‘Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal’. The Guardian observed ‘Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand’ while The Wrap simply decided ‘Minari beams with subtle wonder’.