Reflecting fondly on his childhood in a Korean-American family in rural Arkansas, the film received Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Score. Youn Yuh-yeon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Minari tells the story of a Korean-American family who moves to rural Arkansas. The father has a typical “American dream” and dreams of opening a farm where he can grow Korean vegetables. Circumstances and changes soon cause tension within the family, things are not easy financially, and after a while the family is also joined by Monica’s Korean mother, who moves to the United States to take care of the children.
Minari It is the Korean name for a typical East Asian herb that is easy to grow near water. In the film, young David learns about the herb from his Korean grandmother. The plant can be seen as a metaphor for immigration and the proverbial roots that immigrants take to settling in a new country.
music Emil Mosseri It is melodic and usually quite subdued, and does not contain the intense emotion sometimes found in its notes. The Last Black Man in San Franciscobut he has a clear connection to his music from before. KajillionaireInterestingly, Mosseri wrote the music using little more than the text – so some of the edits to the shots could be adapted to the music and not the other way around.
Mosseri himself says in an interview that it took him some time to find a good balance between the intimate atmosphere of a family of five and the larger context of the landscape and getting used to a new life as an immigrant family. “You don’t want big, bombastic music, you want a soft, intimate atmosphere,” Mosseri says. And he succeeded very well in this.
An important factor in creating the soundtrack is that it used real strings, a 40-piece orchestra from Macedonia, which is completely different from the samples you work with as a composer during the composing process. It is also remarkable that he developed the sound in part by combining a Yamaha piano (also used in Kazillionaire) with an old guitar tuned as low as possible. The combination of these sounds gives the score its unique signature.
