Director Lee Isaac Chung harvests an American dream in Minari.

The riverbed, more than anything else, needed to be exactly right.

In Lee Isaac Chung’s Arkansas-set family drama, Minari, land is something more than a setting. It’s a future. It’s a dream. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) has moved his family to a wide-open Arkansas plot to farm the land and, hopefully, release him and his wife from years of toil at poultry plants. He tills it not for the area’s typical crops but for vegetables common to Korean cooking that he believes will feed other Korean immigrants like himself. His mother-in-law (Youn Yuh-jung) also finds a gentle creek bed to grow minari, the leafy vegetable popular in Korea.