[사설]’Buttercup’ Golden Globe Award for Korea’s Soft Power Show

Korean-American director Lee Isaac Jung’s’Minari’ won the Foreign Language Film Awards of the two major American film awards, Golden Globes yesterday. Last year, director Bong Joon-ho’s’Parasite’ won the same award for the first time in a Korean movie, and it is a feat of showing off the power of Korean content in the world’s popular culture center for two years in a row.

‘Buttercup’ is an autobiographical story of a second-generation American immigrant director about a Korean immigrant family settling in a rural Arkansas village. After receiving the grand prize at the Sundance Film Festival last year, it has swept 74 trophies before the Golden Globe. In particular, Yoon Yeo-jeong, who plays the role of her maternal grandmother Sunja, is receiving praise for raising 26 trophies for the Best Supporting Actor.

It is not easy to get recognition in Hollywood, where more than half of movies made in Korean are exclusive to’subtitled (non-English) movies’. Director Jung also said that he changed his mind to the idea that it would be difficult to capture the identity confusion of immigrants after trying to produce it in 100% English. The characters in the movie impressedly expressed the appearance of an immigrant family who could not take root anywhere, speaking Korean at home and English outside the house. In his impression of the award, director Jung said, “Minari is a story about a family learning their own language. That language is the language in our hearts.” It was a reference to the racism controversy caused by not being nominated for the Golden Globe Awards because the main line of’Minari’ is not English. The Academy Awards, held on the 25th of next month, does not have a language regulation, so you can expect an award for work and a supporting actress. Korean is no longer an unfamiliar language in the world cultural world. Boy group BTS reached the top of the Billboard charts with Korean songs, and many Korean movies and dramas, including the movie’Seungriho’, are gaining popularity on online video service (OTT) platforms such as Netflix, which has a relatively low language barrier. We hope that new and creative Korean content will enrich the world’s cultural world and deliver good news.