2020 was a difficult year for the film industry, but still we were blessed with a few gems including A24’s newest feature. Minari shares the story of a young Korean-American family who move to 1980s Arkansas to find success in the farming industry. Modeled after director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, this movie about pursuing the American Dream is mostly in Korean. The film has already been nominated for nearly 40 awards, winning 19 of them, including the prestigious Sundance Film Festival award.
With such an amazing track record and a 9/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, it would be easy to assume that Minari is up for one of the entertainment industry’s most prized awards: the Golden Globes Best Picture. Unfortunately, because of antiquated rules stating that the Best Picture award cannot go to a film whose dialogue is over 50% in a foreign language, Minari must compete for the foreign language film award instead.
Calling Minari a foreign film is absolutely ridiculous. It was written and directed by a Korean-American man, features a Korean-American cast, follows a story about the American dream, was filmed in America, and was produced by an American company, A24. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that this has happened to a movie made by an Asian American, and just last year, Chinese-American Lulu Wang’s movie, The Farewell was snubbed for being filmed in China even though it featured a star-studded Asian-American cast including Awkwafina.
Although Asian-American stories and films have had to face this discrimination, other movies like Inglourious Basterds have not. Directed by Clint Eastwood and set in WW2 Europe, the movie is almost entirely in German or French. However, when it came time for Golden Globe nominations, Inglourious Basterds competed for Best Picture, not the foreign film award. The same thing happened with the movie Babel, which coincidentally, also starred Brad Pitt.
What’s even more ridiculous about the whole issue is that America has never had an official language, meaning that no language could technically be foreign. Still, the idea of “foreign languages” has long been rooted in our country’s history of racism. During the 1800s, the US government forced Indigenous children to attend abusive schools where they were not allowed to speak their languages or wear cultural clothes. On plantations, enslaved Africans were forced to learn and speak English to quell white people’s fear of revolution. Today, we’ve all seen the viral videos of Latinx and Asian-American people being told to speak English by an angry bigot, so none of us should be surprised by the connection between racism and language suppression in the US.
When an entire community is told that their stories are foreign because they don’t speak English, it cuts deep. Asian-Americans were only recently able to immigrate to the US on a large-scale after Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activits helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1965 which abolished the quota on Asian immigrants.
Even after immigrating, Asian-Americans have constantly been othered for cultural dress, food, holidays, physical appearances, and languages. Actor Daniel Dae Kim expressed this on twitter, saying the Minari snub was, “the film equivalent of being told to go back to your country when that country is America.” Author Kazu Kabuishi chimed in saying, “As long as you look a certain way, you will always be considered a visitor in your own home.”
Fortunately for the HFPA, this controversy has an easy, and extremely simple solution; allow American-made movies in a language other than English to compete for Best Picture. Like Bong Joon Ho said after winning two Oscars for “Parasite” last year, “once you overcome the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”