Lee Isaac Chung

Biography

Lee Isaac Chung (born October 19, 1978) is an American filmmaker. His debut feature Munyurangabo (2007) was an official selection at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and the first narrative feature film in the Kinyarwanda language.

Chung gained fame for directing the semi-autobiographical film Minari (2020), for which he received numerous major awards and nominations, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a nomination for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the 93rd Academy Awards.

 In 2023, he directed an episode in the third season of the Star Wars series The Mandalorian.

Chung was born on October 19, 1978,  in Denver, to a family from South Korea. His family lived briefly in Atlanta before moving to a small farm in rural Lincoln, Arkansas. He attended Lincoln High School.

He is an alumnus of the U.S. Senate Youth Program. He attended Yale University to study biology. At Yale, with exposure to world cinema in his senior year, he dropped his plans for medical school to pursue film-making. He later pursued graduate studies in film-making at the University of Utah.

Chung's directorial debut was Munyurangabo, a movie set in Rwanda, a collaboration with students at an international relief base in Kigali, the capital city. It tells an intimate story about the friendship between two boys in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. 

Chung had accompanied his wife Valerie, an art therapist, to Rwanda in 2006 when she volunteered to work with those affected by the 1994 genocide. He taught a film-making class at a relief base in Kigali. 

The movie was an opportunity to present the contemporary reality of Rwanda and to provide his students with practical film training. 

After he developed a nine-page outline with co-writer Samuel Gray Anderson, Chung shot the film over 11 days, working with a team of nonprofessional actors Chung found through local orphanages and with his students as crew members.