When filmmakers take their own bio, things can go wrong.

The view of one's own past can be too unreflective, too transfigured, even kitschy.

The American director Lee Isaac Chung sometimes barely misses this trap with "Minari - Where We Put Down Roots".

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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Semiautobiographically, he tells of a South Korean immigrant family who are trying to make a fresh start in the Arkansas countryside. The father wants to prove that he can support his family by growing vegetables. The mother grew up in the big city and is ashamed of the social decline into farm life, especially when her own mother from South Korea moves into her simple house. The couple's conflict hangs above everything else.

Meanwhile, little son David is looking for adventure in nature, roams through fields, watches his grandmother growing the Minari herb by the river, a slightly hot celery-like vegetable from Korea that defies the harshest soil conditions (which is a metaphor for the family ).

Problems with getting a foothold on the farm, the latent racism of the neighbors or the clash of different religions in the American Midwest are only hinted at by “Minari”, the focus remains on the family drama, which is told over long periods like a template.

Scenes like diamond splinters on a plastic crown

Chung makes the film quite conventional, without antics with editing or light, draws the story along the chronology of the events, sometimes pours a little much cheerful music over the images of the children playing in the countryside or of the father with the tractor plowing a field. What saves the film are the actors: Youn Yuh-jung rightly got an Oscar for her idiosyncratic grandmother, who would rather play cards than bake cookies, and Alan Kim puts little David towards her with a droll frankness (“I would like to not that grandmother is sleeping in my room, she smells like Korea ”).

It is up to these two that scenes creep into the shallow flow of the narrative that reveal truths about interpersonal relationships.

They stand out like real diamond splinters on a plastic crown.

One such scene shows little David confessing in bed at night that he is afraid of dying.

With each “don't run so fast!” His parents remind him that he has a hole in his heart and that great effort endangers his life.

But they talk as little about the problem as they do about the emotions it triggers in him.

So, of all people, he tells his grandmother, with whom he doesn't really have a warm relationship.

And she, too, who usually only takes the boy half seriously, sings to him softly in the dark in Korean about the Minari herb until he falls asleep.

The scene doesn't stand out because the camera or lighting do something special here, but because it gets closer to the protagonists than the rest of the film, because it tells of overcoming the barrier that stands between these two people, who may belong to the same family, but could hardly be more different culturally. Sometimes you wish the film had the courage to focus entirely on the relationship between these disparate characters instead of telling the great immigrant epic about the search for the American dream.