The industry is a machine designed to crush the personal and reward the generic. When a filmmaker attempts to tell a story that is highly specific, deeply intimate, and spoken in a language other than English, the studios do not merely pass on the project; they look at the filmmaker as if they are insane. It is a miracle that Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari exists at all, particularly because the director himself was on the verge of surrendering to the academy.
Alternative Financing: The Ecosystem of Belief
Before Minari was greenlit, Chung was preparing to abandon the brutal ecosystem of independent cinema. He had directed small, non-commercial art house films and was ready to accept a quiet life as a university professor in South Korea.
But a film is not willed into existence by the director alone; it requires an ecosystem of belief. Bref, it requires a producer who understands the exact cultural frequency of the script. Christina Oh, a producer at Plan B Entertainment, read the script and recognized her own childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants in the 1980s.
The Partnership
Plan B understood the immense risk of a deeply personal mid-tier indie where the majority of the dialogue is spoken in Korean. They needed a distributor who was not frightened by subtitles.
C’est le risque du métier. They strategically partnered with A24, a studio that had recently proven its willingness to gamble on bilingual immigrant narratives with Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. This specific, highly targeted partnership between Plan B and A24 created the protective financial bubble necessary to pull Chung back from the brink of retirement and allow him to craft a masterpiece.
Insights regarding Lee Isaac Chung’s near-retirement, Christina Oh’s crucial advocacy at Plan B Entertainment, and the strategic financing partnership with A24 were compiled from production histories detailed in The Hollywood Reporter and verified against Wikipedia.