Riceboy Sleeps
2023 · Anthony Shim
In the 1990s, an immigrant single mother raises her teenage son in the Canadian suburbs, determined to provide a better life for him than the one she left behind in South Korea.
dir. Anthony Shim · 2023
A Korean single mother and her son build a life in 1990s suburban Canada, and the film watches the ground shift between them across a decade — the boy assimilating, the mother holding fast, both carrying a grief neither can fully name. Anthony Shim's second feature is semi-autobiographical, and it belongs to the remarkable wave of Asian-diaspora cinema alongside Minari and Past Lives, though its temperament is its own: patient, unsentimental, alert to casual cruelty and to the fierce practicality of immigrant love. Shot on 16mm, it moves in long handheld takes that drift through kitchens, factory floors, and schoolyards like a family member trailing behind, the grain lending the '90s scenes the texture of memory rather than pastiche. Choi Seung-yoon, a dancer in her first screen role, gives one of the great recent debut performances as So-young — spine-straight, wry, quietly volcanic. The film won the Platform Prize at Toronto, announcing Shim (who also appears onscreen as the mother's suitor) as a filmmaker of unusual tact. Its final movement, back across the Pacific, earns every tear it draws.
Lines of influence
- Minari (2020) — Semi-autobiographical Korean-immigrant family drama filtered through a child's eye, using ethnographic domestic realism and restrained naturalistic performance rather than melodramatic underscoring — the explicit template Shim's film extends.
- Past Lives (2023) — Diaspora narrative built on transnational return and decade-spanning ellipses, holding emotion in patient two-shots and withheld reaction rather than expository dialogue.
- The Farewell (2019) — Structures its drama around a diaspora protagonist's return to the homeland, balancing grief with restraint through composed observational framing of family gatherings.
- Gook (2017) — Korean-American semi-autobiographical realism shot in grainy monochrome with handheld intimacy, foregrounding non-professional/first-time leads in close, unglamorized frames.
- Blue Bayou (2021) — Uses film-grain texture and handheld proximity to render immigrant/adoptee precarity, tying an intimate parent-child bond to the threat of forced transnational removal.
- Aftersun (2022) — Semi-autobiographical memory film built from grainy, low-fi textures and elliptical patient observation of a parent-child relationship, trusting the audience to assemble grief from withheld information.
- Ratcatcher (1999) — Establishes the 16mm-grain childhood-observational poetic: elliptical, patient framing of a working-class boy where texture and long looks carry meaning instead of plot mechanics.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — Founding semi-autobiographical child-protagonist film whose handheld mobility and observational looseness license the naturalistic, non-judgmental gaze on a boy's inner life.
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — 16mm black-and-white ethnographic neighborhood realism cast with non-professionals, prioritizing textured everyday duration over dramatic incident.
- Yi Yi (2000) — Generation- and time-spanning family portrait told through patient long-take observation of domestic space, a structural model for the decade-spanning, quietly-accreting family drama.
- Still Walking (2008) — Grief-saturated family drama that stages a mother's emotional undercurrents through restrained performance and patient domestic observation rather than confrontation.
- Secret Sunshine (2007) — Korean grief drama anchored by a restrained lead performance and long observational takes that let anguish surface gradually within unbroken duration.
- Fish Tank (2009) — Handheld 16mm intimacy shadowing a first-time nonprofessional lead in tight, boxy frames, using grain and proximity to bind us to an adolescent's restless subjectivity.
- Wendy and Lucy (2008) — 16mm minimalist realism of economic precarity built on patient observational stillness and a pared-down, restrained central performance.
- The Namesake (2006) — Decade-spanning immigrant family saga hinged on transnational return and an evolving mother-child bond across two countries and generations.
- The Son (2002) — Codifies the handheld long-take following-shot as an ethical device — the camera trailing a body in unbroken real time to build restrained emotional tension without score.