By early 2019, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung had resigned himself to the fact that his film career might be over. He’d felt as much a year earlier and decided to write a semi-autobiographical script called Minari , but everything would change in February 2019, when Plan B agreed to produce the story about his childhood experiences on his family’s Arkansas farm. A24 came on board as distributor a few months later, and Chung, then teaching in South Korea, suddenly found himself on set that July, reliving many of his own childhood memories by way of the film’s shooting location, Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Chung later insisted that Twisters also be shot in Oklahoma, and the childhood home of Daisy Edgar-Jones’ lead character is owned by a Minari extra.)

Minari was set to premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and win the American award