Lee Isaac Chung
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Uprooted: Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung on Minari
The following interview appears in Filmmaker‘s current Winter ’21 print edition and, a day after Minari won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, appears online for all readers for the first time. “There’s a difference between something having happened or something being true,” says writer/director Lee Isaac Chung about the interplay between memory and creation that graces his fourth dramatic feature, Minari. Based on the filmmaker’s childhood—his family moved to the South, where his father hoped to develop a farm—Minari captures a time of familial change and uncertainty with seemingly effortless poetry and wonder. It’s the early 1980s […]
by Aaron Stewart-Ahn on Feb 10, 2021 -
A Matter of Life and Death: Lee Isaac Chung and Abigail Harm
We all require friendship, companionship. In the three films Lee Isaac Chung (known as Isaac) has made, he observes assorted relationships in vastly different milieu: in Munyurangabo (2007), the bustling central market of Kigali, the capitol of Rwanda, and that country’s verdant countryside and poor isolated villages; a beach house smacking of privilege on the southeastern coast of the U.S. in Lucky Life (2010); and, in his latest, the mysterious, inventive Abigail Harm (2013), a large but charmless apartment on a depressing, sparsely populated edge of New York City. The dramatic emphases, however, are less on bonding than on the […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 28, 2013 -
The Forgiveness of Blood — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Forgiveness of Blood is being distributed by Sundance Selects and comes to theaters on February 24, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first posted at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with its screening at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.) The future of American independent filmmaking may not lie in America at all. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have turned their eyes away from the complexities of 21st century American life and toward the world beyond our national borders. The decision to engage another culture through filmmaking, to […]
by Tom Hall on Feb 23, 2012 -
JUNE VOD CALENDAR
Now up on our VOD Calendar are titles available for the month of June. Some of the highlights: Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (see our video interview with Arteta from Sundance), Lee Isaac Chung‘s moving sophmore effort Lucky Life, the Sundance Audience Award winning doc Buck and Michael Winterbottom‘s comedy The Trip. For titles from previous months go to our VOD Calendar homepage.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jun 1, 2011 -
Lee Isaac Chung, Munyurangabo
ERIC NDORUNKUNDIYE AND JOSEF “JEFF” RUTAGENGWA IN DIRECTOR LEE ISAAC CHUNG’S MUNYURANGABO. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT. For Lee Isaac Chung, filmmaking is linked to tackling challenges and obstacles above and beyond those inherent to the cinematic process. The son of Korean immigrants, Chung was born in Denver in 1978 and grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas. He attended Yale and was studying biology, on track to become a doctor, when he discovered arthouse movies. Rather than continue on his path to a medical career, Chung took a filmmaking class given by Michael Roemer and went on to earn an […]
by Nick Dawson on May 29, 2009
