Jacob, brimming with fierce desperation, just wants to provide a better life for his family. The cast anchors the tender film with genuine, gut-wrenching performances. The Yi family is key to his search for deliverance, but through his mutually beneficial partnership with Jacob, he offers an optimistic view of the world and supports the farmer’s blind commitment to actualizing his American dream.

Neighbor and farmhand Paul (Will Patton) is a devout Pentecostal, carrying a cross with him each Sunday and speaking in tongues. Yet, his dreams for the farm are constantly extinguished via drought, flame and other quasi-divine interventions. The family farm is Jacob’s beacon of hope, the potential to grow his own Garden of Eden and start life anew with his family in America after a decade of struggles. The film explores the hunt for salvation through blood, sweat and tears. Kim), Minari recalls the celebrated works of Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck, following an ordinary family that just happens to be Korean. Told from the perspective of seven-year-old David (played by Alan S. But when Grandma Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) arrives from Korea, the family’s world really begins to change as they try replanting their roots in Arkansan soil - “the best dirt in America.” Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) hopes to make a life for himself and his family by harvesting Korean vegetables on a plot of land in the middle of the Ozarks, while his wife Monica (Yeri Han) suffers as she feels uprooted from their old life in California. In Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film Minari, the titular hardy Korean herb offers a simple, yet beautiful, metaphor for the Yi family as they survive the plight many immigrant families face when searching for the American dream. Coming to this ‘hillbilly place’ was for our family.”

Film semi family