"Liquor Store Dreams" - Tribeca Film Fest
So Yun Um’s debut feature is an introspective look at her family’s life and their experiences as an immigrant family in Los Angeles. Liquor Store Dreams, the feature length film, expands on her 2018 short film, Liquor Store Babies, and covers a lot of the same ideas thematically. So Yun’s parents run a liquor store in south central LA and it has been the family business for as long as So Yun has been alive. It’s primarily run by Hae Sup Um, her father, but So Yun and her sister help from time to time.
On Skid Row, Danny Park runs a liquor store with his mother. Danny grew up in LA, but always dreamed of working in the marketing department of Nike. He decided to run from his home in LA to the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, a total of (roughly) 963 miles. His grand plan worked, and Nike hired an ecstatic (and probably exhausted) Danny. A few years later, his father passed away and he made the decision to leave his job at Nike and work full-time at the liquor store with his mother.
Liquor Store Dreams is about people trying to understand one another. Not just people in different communities, but people within the same family. Despite their shared genes, family members can often feel more like strangers than actual strangers on the street. So Yun and Danny attempt to cope with the burdens of their immigrant families’ expectations as they reconcile them with their own personal goals.
Liquor Store Dreams + David Magdael & Associates + The Film Sales Company
The Covid-19 pandemic begins as So Yun is filming this documentary and with it comes the summer of 2020. The murder of George Floyd launched thousands of protests against police brutality across the country and around the world as people demanded social justice. Liquor Store Dreams attempts to explain the tensions between Korean and Black communities through the lens of that summer, but the film is unable to unpack the full context in the time allotted.
So Yun shows an immense amount of heart and respect in Liquor Store Dreams. The audience can see it in the sheer scope of topics she attempts to cover. It’s both a blessing and a curse. So Yun, Danny, and their families are interesting enough to warrant an in-depth documentary for each one of them. Another feature-length documentary could have been made about how the racial tensions in Los Angeles and the Rodney King protests of the ’90s that Hae Sup lived through mirror the George Floyd protests of today.
Liquor Store Dreams is a prime example of using a small life as a lens through which to view a much larger picture.
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Letterboxd, and YouTube.