The Canadian filmmaker of Korean origin, Anthony Shim, presented himself with an emotional, tender and touching coming-of-age drama, which he designed partly based on his own experiences growing up in Canada. And not only did Shim write and direct the film premiered at the Toronut festival, but he is also a producer, editor and played a supporting role. Comparisons with a much more well-known film about the experiences of Korean immigrants in America, namely “Minari”, are impossible to avoid, and Shim made a film that is in no way inferior to Lee Isaac Chung’s award-winning film.
The story begins in 1990, when So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) from South Korea moved to Canada after a family tragedy. After her husband became mentally ill and took his own life, So-Young was left alone with her little son, and in the first part of the film we follow how she and seven-year-old Dong-Hyun adjust to life in Canada. In the beginning, they are the only immigrants from Korea among the mostly white population and little Dong-Hyun is the main target of teasing and even bullying children at school, hence the nickname Riceboy. They feel that they stand out in the new environment, and “Riceboy Sleeps” also deals with silent but systematic racism.
So after just a few days at school, the teacher will tell the mother to change her son’s name to an Anglo-Saxon one because no one can pronounce his real name, so Dong-Hyun will become David, and soon we move nine years into the future when he is already a 16-year-old young man. We see that he has fit in relatively well, has company, is intelligent and promising, but he seems somehow angry, unhappy, partly because his mother never wanted to tell him what really happened with his father. However, the circumstances will be such that the mother will have to reveal everything to her son by force of circumstances, and although it is a melodrama that almost brings tears to the eyes towards the end, Shim recorded a convincing, life-like and emotional drama.
In the center of attention here, however, is the mother’s sacrifice and her infinite love for her son. It is clear to us that So-young subordinated absolutely everything so that her son not only has a better life than her, but also that he has much better opportunities at the start and that he does not have to do exhausting physical work on the factory line like her. I guess it’s in Asian culture that these people don’t complain and whine, so So-young stoically endures all the adversities that life will throw at her. “Riceboy Sleeps” was shot with a lot of style, so in the vast majority of the film we have long, continuous shots taken with a moving camera in a vertical aspect ratio of 4:3. Only when the mother and son arrive in their native Korea at the end of the film, the camera will change to standard, and it is the film that seems so honest, real.
It’s a universal story and it’s obvious that Shim himself lived through some of what will happen to the young protagonist, and he probably went through an identity crisis while growing up, completely torn between his Korean heritage and origin and the Western influence that shaped him at least equally. It is a film that is certainly a kind of Shim’s thanks to his parents who, perhaps like Dong-Hyun’s mother, worked hard and sacrificed so that he would have a better chance. When he was the same age as his main character, maybe even he couldn’t understand it and understand what all these people had to go through, but when a person matures, a person realizes how lucky he was.