When is a film foreign-language, and when is it an American production that happens to be filmed in a language other than English?
As awards season approaches, the question has angered Asian American film-makers and other figures in Hollywood, who have expressed dismay that the film Minari will compete for honors at next year’s Golden Globes in the foreign language category, rather than the higher-profile best drama field.
Minari is the story of a Korean American family that moves to rural Arkansas to start a farm during the 1980s. It won the top prize at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, and is expected to be a strong contender in the 2021 awards season.
Last week, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Golden Globes, accepted Minari in the foreign language film category – despite the fact that director Lee Isaac Chung is American, and that the cast is made up of American actors and takes place in the US. Much of the dialogue is in Korean.
Actor Simu Liu was part of widespread anger on social media. “Just for the record, Minari is an American movie written and directed by an American film-maker set in America, with an American lead actor and produced by an American production company,” he posted.
Writing in the Washington Post, author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer winner of the The Sympathizer, said that the “decision speaks powerfully to the issue of what makes something – a language or a person or a culture – foreign”.
“What languages can be considered American? Can anyone who primarily speaks a language other than English be considered American?” he said. “The association of the United States with English runs deep, even if it has no official language.”
The categorization of Minari, says the author, “stings”.
“If, hypothetically, Steven Spielberg were to make an epic about the Jewish immigrant experience and script much of it in Yiddish, he could probably persuade the HFPA to consider his movie an American story, and rightly so.”
The difference, Nguyen says, is that “Chung is a young film-maker of an Asian-American background, and Asian Americans have historically always been seen as foreigners in this country, even if they can trace their roots back to the 1800s or earlier.”
Other experts agreed. “It’s a problem to say this is a foreign-language film,” said professor Wayne Wright, Barbara I Cook chair of language and literacy at Purdue University. “Those of us who look at language diversity in the US prefer to think of these as heritage or community languages and to move away from saying foreign languages, because they’re definitely not foreign.”
Hollywood, Wright said, has been slow to catch up. “It’s a multilingual film that reflects the reality of Americans that are multilingual. So it’s authentic to have that dialog in the language that would have been spoken growing up in a family like this growing up in rural Arkansas. What could be more American than that?”
The dispute is not new. Last year, the association designated Lulu Wang’s The Farewell as foreign language. Wang and her lead actor, Awkwafina, are American.
Wang condemned the treatment of Minari. “I have not seen a more American film than Minari this year. It’s a story about an immigrant family, IN America, pursuing the American dream. We really need to change these antiquated rules that characterizes American as only English-speaking,” she said.
The issue comes as Hollywood is faced with accusations around race, including casting white actors in non-white roles and other issues of representation.
The Israeli actor Gal Gadot, the star of the upcoming Cleopatra, last week spoke out after she was criticized for being cast as the Egyptian queen.
“First of all, if you want to be true to the facts, then Cleopatra was Macedonian,” Gadot told BBC Arabic. “We were looking for a Macedonian actress that could fit Cleopatra. She wasn’t there, and I was very passionate about Cleopatra.”
“To me, as a people lover, and I have friends across the globe, whether they’re Muslims or Christian or Catholic or atheist or Buddhist, or Jewish, of course, people are people, and with me, I want to celebrate the legacy of Cleopatra and honor this amazing historic icon that I admire so much.”