Lee Isaac Chung

Lee Isaac Chung was born in Denver, Colorado, but his parents were Korean immigrants, roots the future filmmaker was always very proud of, while also seeing himself as genuinely American. He spent his childhood on the family farm in Lincoln, Arkansas, and this experience and many others personal and familiar to him would serve to shape his emotional film Minari of him. Family history. For example, his maternal grandfather died in the Korean War, so dealing with his widowed grandmother moving to the United States is something that really happened to Chung, as well as things like not learning English or having a stroke. . When undertaking this film, the filmmaker avoided talking about it to his family until it was almost finished, and having their approval and verifying his emotions after screening it was a real gift for him, the confirmation of his talent and his cinematographic vocation. .

When it came to undertaking university studies, his rural experiences were decisive, as he obtained a degree in Ecology from Yale University. Although he had plans to continue medical studies, he gave them up to dedicate himself to the cinema. Her film training would be obtained at the University of Utah, where she graduated in 2004.

After directing several shorts, an essential training school for any self-respecting filmmaker, he shot his first feature film, Munyurangabo , in 2007. The description of what seemed like an improbable youthful friendship between two representatives of irreconcilable ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, turned out to be a magnificent letter of introduction at the Cannes Film Festival, although it did not obtain the coveted Golden Camera to which debut films aspire. He thus created ties with Rwanda that resulted in an agreement with filmmakers there to create Almond Tree Films Rwanda, and a production company and film school. From there would come the 2015 documentary I Have Seen My Last Born , which he co-directed.

The filmmaker continued to outline a career where humanism was essential with Lucky Life , from 2010, which described a meeting of friends, a camping trip, one of them with terminal cancer, served to underline the value of life, also because two , married, plan to be parents soon.

Proof that Chung was still keeping her origins in mind was Abigail Harm (2012), the story of an old woman who is granted a love wish, and which is inspired by a Korean folklore tale.

But nothing he had done previously prepared Chung for Minari’s terrific reception. History of my family , which although it is fiction, contains many autobiographical elements. He assured the director and screenwriter that “for me, the film is reduced to expecting the best from each other. Above all, I wanted to let the viewer enter the world of this family with sincerity and honesty, without judging anyone. There is much more that unites us as human beings than the superficial categories that we have created. The literary influences he mentions give an idea of ​​how Korean culture, with the minari herb and the memory of his grandmother, and the idea of ​​the American dream coexist in him, since he wanted to capture the spirit of the literature of Flannery O’Connor and Willa Cather. And at the same time, he was adamant that the film, in almost all of its footage, should be spoken in Korean, the language used at home by the leading family. In the end, the key to the fact that the film has moved the world, including its 6 Oscar nominations, has to do with the fact that it tells a universal family story, with elements such as immigration, which are recognizable. by most viewers, and it’s not that far off from Hollywood classics like The Grapes of Wrath , when it comes to the problems faced by the protagonists.

After the Minari tsunami, where he had the support of Brad Pitt ‘s Plan B production company , Chung already has a new project, a version with live-action actors of the popular anime Your Name , in which the protagonists swap bodies, which without It will certainly serve to develop the proverbial humanity of his filmography.

Chung, married with a daughter, and living in Brooklyn, New York, conceived the film around eight memories of family stories and personal experiences, thinking about how he would want to talk to the little girl about her roots and what she lived through when she was her age. Although he admits that there are things of him in both the boy and the father in the film: “David is a mixture of myself wanting to say things to me and wanting to say them to my daughter.”