Riceboy Sleeps, the feature directorial debut of Anthony Shim, is a well-crafted and strongly-acted telling of a familiar Korean-Canadian immigration tale. It screened at the 20th Independent Film Festival Boston.
Riceboy Sleeps is Anthony Shim’s feature directorial debut. It screened at the 20th Independent Film Festival Boston, and had previously won the TIFF 2022 Platform Prize.
Riceboy Sleeps follows a Korean family who have recently moved to Canada in the 90s. We follow single mother So-young (Choi Seung-yoon) who works a factory job while sustaining racism and sexism, and her seven year-old son Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) who is bullied by his otherwise all-white class. The perspective flips between these dual narratives, juxtaposing their struggles while highlighting the growing distance between mother and son.
The movie then brings us to 1999. Teenage Dong-hyun (Ethan Hwang) seemingly gets along with his classmates, but at the cost of dying his hair, wearing contact lenses, and losing his name—he now goes by David. So-young, still working the same job, worries her son is slipping away from her parental reach and their Korean heritage. Riceboy Sleeps takes the Asian immigration coming-of-age narrative that has found success in recent years and uses its strengths to their best capacity, if not transgressing past its tropes or expectable narrative beats.
The greatest strength of the movie is Choi’s performance as So-young, playing perfectly a woman with more internal strength than she can communicate. The performance is made more impressive as her debut role, for which she was awarded Best Actress by the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. Throughout the movie she resiliently faces the burden of composure against all sorts of prejudice, and moments in which her unspoken anger slips are equal parts terrifying and cathartic. Riceboy Sleeps may at first seem to be a straightforward coming-of-age tale, but it soon reveals itself to be more of a character study: of an immigrant mother neither willing to leave nor assimilate. So-young has built a wall up around herself to survive in a foreign country despite hardly speaking English, and she tries her best to toughen her son to the same standard. She instills virtues of cultural resilience and traditional ideals of masculinity common to Asian systems of belief, in an attempt to strengthen her timid young son.
Though her approach is sometimes flawed, the movie’s most tender scenes are in these small moments of teaching. In one humorous moment, she instructs Dong-hyun to weaponize his classmates’ prejudices by telling his classmates he knows Taekwondo; however, this backfires when he retaliates against their racist bullying and is unfairly disciplined for an act of self-defense. The reality Riceboy Sleeps drills in is that kids suck, but adults suck more. The first act may provide an accurate picture of 90s racism in Canada, but sometimes feels overwrought with trauma that it teeters into being too frustrating to watch. Of course, it’s difficult to determine the line between necessary misery and belaboring an argument, and the injustice portrayed only helps lead into a poignant conclusion
The nine-year timeskip structure demonstrates the adverse effect this type of rigid parenting can have on a child. Dong-hyun as a teenager mostly rejects his mother’s philosophy, instead avoiding conflict while adopting the behaviors of his white peers. The movie proposes these as opposite approaches to survival, posing the question of whether getting along is worth it at the cost of one’s cultural identity. But from this point, the conflict of the movie has only just begun: a pivotal change in their lives forces Dong-hyun and his mother to reexamine their drifting relationship.
Though the plot contains heavy themes, there is only joy to be found in the detail given to depictions of Korean cuisine in the movie, and the overall texture of the 90s that Shim paints from an obvious place of familiarity. Much of the runtime is comprised of slow, inconsequential scenes: So-young eating with her coworkers, Dong-hyun listening to music while pretending to do homework. Formally, the movie is gorgeous. Everything is captured with extreme halation, giving a wondrous glow to the Canadian landscapes heavily featured as backdrops.
Riceboy Sleeps is equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming. It’s a formidable debut directorial effort with an exceptional debut lead performance. And though the overall narrative is nothing new, its story consists of textures from a world that only Shin could know: the movie is an evident passion project informed by a life, and is the type of perspective that definitely deserves to be made and seen.
