Lee Isaac Chung, writer-director of award-winning film 'Minari,' talks about putting his childhood on film, being an Oscar contender, and what he learned at the University of Utah

Lee Isaac Chung was born in Denver, grew up in Arkansas, went to college at Yale, and is now a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

But we in Utah can claim Chung — writer-director of the immigrant drama “Minari” — as one of its own, because he went to film school as a graduate student at the University of Utah.

“I loved how close the mountains were and just the life there was pretty quiet and nice, a good place to focus on film,” Chung said in an interview I did with him last month for The Salt Lake Tribune.

“Minari” won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and went on to win the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. (Yeah, about that — even though the movie was made in the United States, and is very much a story about immigrants adjusting to their new lives in America, because it’s largely in Korean, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association punted it into the foreign-language category.) It also was chosen the year’s best movie by the Utah Film Critics Association, of which I’m a member.

Read my interview with Chung here, at sltrib.com.