"Minari" six Oscar nominations are comparable to "Parasite", the film is internationalized, and the Korean Super-Japanese is the same as that of "Parasite".

Source: Global Times

In the list of nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards released on the 15th, the film "Minari" (poster pictured below) created by Korean filmmakers and told about life in Koreans in the United States won 6 nominations including best picture, best director, and best actor - following last year's "Parasite", "Korean Wave" has once again become the focus of the world film industry, and the international road of its rising stars is worth exploring.

The technique of Parasite, the emotion of Minari

Before being nominated for the Oscars, "Minari" had already won a lot of awards in this year's North American awards season, including winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the end of last month. Although the film is mostly Korean dialogue, it is actually a Korean-American co-production, not a Korean "official selection" film required by the Oscar rules, so it is not eligible to compete for the Academy Award for Best International Film (formerly the Best Foreign Language Film Award), and "The Ministers of Namsan" selected by the Korean Film Promotion Committee failed to be nominated for the award. "Minari" received acclaim when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States early last year, and its reputation continued for a whole year, and under the experienced publicity of A24 in the United States, it received the same number of Oscar nominations as last year's "Parasite".

Unlike Parasite's elaborate structure and directorial skills, Minari's strengths lie in real life details and genuine family feelings: The film, with the director's autobiographical imprint, tells the story of a Korean immigrant family who moved from the West Coast of the United States to a farm in remote Arkansas in the 1980s, with hidden contradictions between husband and wife and children, and the arrival of grandma plunging the family into deeper difficulties in the hilarity. Since its premiere in Sundance last year, "Minari" has received wide acclaim from American critics, with a 98% super high recommendation on Rotten Tomatoes and a media rating of 88 on the Metacritic film review website. The Wall Street Journal praised the film as "fantastic and more intriguing to director Lee Ezak Cheng's personal experience," and the Los Angeles Times said the film "makes people remember all the struggles in the film." CNN commented that "while the overall rhythm is a bit loose, the theme is so loud and clear that it's quite powerful."

The "Juniors" of Japanese and Chinese Cinema

In the history of the international film world and the Oscars, Chinese and Japanese films have appeared much earlier than in South Korea. Driven by the well-known directors of the generation of Akira Kurosawa and Sadanosuke Igusa, Japanese films have attracted international film attention as early as the 1950s, and works such as Rashomon Gate, Hell Gate, and Miyamoto Musashi have become famous, but after that, there was some silence, and the most recent award was "Entering the Mortician" (Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) in 2009. Similarly, when the fifth generation of directors rose, Chinese films frequently entered the Western home in the 1990s, from "Ju Dou" in 1991 to "Farewell to the Overlord" in 1994, and Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Zhang Yimou's "Hero" after the new millennium pushed the martial arts theme to the peak. However, it was not until 18 years later that it regained attention with this realistic "Young You".

Compared with the era of internationalization of Chinese and Japanese films, the Korean film industry is relatively backward: it just started in the 1960s, and in the 1990s it was still imitating Japanese and Chinese Hong Kong films, and the real accumulation was after the outbreak of the new millennium. Directors such as Lim Kwon-taek, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Lee Cang-dong, Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-so have gradually tried their first cries at international film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice and so on, from "Drunken Painting Fairy" in 2002 and "Old Boy" in 2003, to the later "Mother", "Holy Death", "Alone by the Sea at Night", "Burning", and finally in "Parasite" won the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Oscar Little Golden Man cheers, helping Korean films reach the top of the international film world.

Among these internationally renowned directors, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho's genre style is the most commercially entertaining and at the same time the most easily accepted by Western audiences. The two also actively took over English dialogue films and expanded their influence in the mainstream markets of Europe and the United States, such as Park Chan-wook's hollywood suspense film "Stoker" and Bong Joon-ho's science fiction blockbuster "Snow Country Train" that received international attention and box office more than common Korean films. Park Bong and the two were also invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as members of the jury eligible to vote for the Oscars.

The problem behind the rise

Today's Korean filmmakers are no longer limited to creating and shooting on Chungmuro in Seoul, but are increasingly going out in search of a freer development. Last year's "Parasite" Oscar award made Korean films a sought-after commodity in overseas markets for a while - according to the Us "Screen Daily" reported a few days ago, despite the epidemic, the sales of Korean films in the international market in 2020 still increased by 43%; at the beginning of this year, on the online trading platform of the Berlin Film Festival, Korean films also attracted many buyers. However, the rise of Korean films has also exposed its lack of theoretical background, genre imbalance and weak industrial base, rough personnel organization and other shortcomings, the annual output of action movies are becoming more and more homogeneous, entertainment companies, predecessors of the suppression of newcomers scandals from time to time.

This year's "Minari" can get such a high degree of attention in the North American awards season, partly "thanks" to the award of "Parasite" last year, coupled with the unity and efforts of Korean filmmakers such as Bong Joon-ho, and the popularity of K-pop music and other K-pop representatives around the world. It is the subtle output of these cultural soft powers that has gradually affected the impression of Korean films and culture by the mainstream media and ordinary audiences in the United States, and they will pay attention to and recommend "Minari", a niche art film about "Korean descendants planting cress", and learn about the difficulties encountered by ethnic minority immigrants in their daily lives. From this point of view, the 6 Oscar nominations received by "Minari" are not only important for the unknown Korean director Lee Esak Jung, the American drama familiar face Steven Won and the Korean veteran drama bone Yoon Ru-jeong, but also important and enlightening for all Asian Americans to integrate into the local society.

It is foreseeable that after "Parasite" and "Minari" become popular, Korean movies, films and television works with Korean cultural elements and Korean actors will receive more attention in the United States. However, in order to maintain freshness for a long time, we must also come up with a more international perspective, more classic works worth remembering and passing on.