Riceboy Sleeps: Mother-Son Relations Exalted and Explored in Acclaimed Canuck Drama

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A-

Vancouver writer-director Anthony Shim’s intimate family drama Riceboy Sleeps has been racking up awards playing film festivals on its way to theatrical release.

The beautifully wrought, deeply heartfelt film was named the Rogers Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association, which comes with a $100,000 prize. It was awarded the 2022 Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s been honoured in his home province as well: the Vancouver Film Critics Circle named it Best British Columbia Film.

As well, Riceboy Sleeps has been nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards — Shim is nominated for best director and best original screenplay, Christopher Lew for achievement in cinematography and lead actress Choi Seung-Yoon for best performance in a leading role.

Choi Seung-Yoon stars as So-Young, who choses to leave South Korea for Canada her with a young son to find a better life for both of them after her boyfriend dies.

Settling in a town in British Columbia, So-Young gets herself a factory job, and drags Dong-Hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) off to his first day of school. Dong-Hyun is the only Asian kid in his class and is very aware of that difference.

The kids make fun of his traditional Korean lunch, which leads them to taunt him with the nickname Riceboy. When So-Young comes to pick him up at the end of the school day, the teacher suggests that they give him a ‘Canadian’ name. They pick David.

So-Young may look vulnerable, but she has a will of steel and a ferocious love for her son and is determined to help him not only fit in, but to be strong in himself. She’s an example of strength, but she’s not rigid. She’s also sensitive to what he’s going through.

Read our interview with the director and co-star of Riceboy Sleeps

When Dong-Hyun asks if she’d make him lunch that’s Canadian so he can be like the other kids, she not only obliges, but makes the same sandwiches for herself. But fitting in is going to take more than sandwiches.

So-Young has given him the instructions to stand up for himself, and so next time he’s challenged, he boldly gets into a fistfight. When the school suspends him, and not the kids who taunted him, So-Young accuses the school of being racist. When it comes her son, she will not take any guff.

So-Young continues to work at the factory where she has friendships with some of the other women, including a fellow Korean. She begins a relationship with a man called Simon (Anthony Shim), who wants to marry her. But her focus is raising her son, and his happiness is her priority. Putting herself last has consequences for her.

By the time he hits his teenage years, Dong-Hyun (now played by Ethan Hwang) has that sense of being at ease with others, at least on the surface. Outwardly, he’s a pretty typical Canadian teen, easygoing with a group of friends. He’s also pulling away from his mother, or trying to. There’s a tug of war between a desire to be rebellious and the well-behaved boy. But also in the mix is a slight sense of rootlessness to him, of not quite feeling settled in himself.

Things comes to a head when the class gets a major school assignment to dig into their family history. This is a missing piece in his life. So-Young has never spoken to him about his father, beyond saying that he died in Korea. Dong-Hyun starts to probe, initially meeting resistance from his mother.

But a family crisis changes So-Young’s mind, and she decides that the time has come for her to take him to Korea, so he can learn about his father, meet his paternal grandparents, and she can help him connect in a more visceral way with his roots.

Riceboy Sleeps is Shim’s second feature film, and it reveals him as a wonderful storyteller.

Shim keeps the film very simple, focusing on these two characters in small moments over a span of time. The film feels natural, never forced, or artificial. And yet slowly and quietly, we get a sense of who these people are and their relationship, even as things change over the years.

Shim is helped along by a superb cast. Both young boys playing Dong-Hyun do wonderful work, but the bulk of the film focuses on the character’s teen years, and Ethan Hwang is terrific, playing a character who is quietly grappling with a sense of feeling unsettled, and questions about his identity that he can’t quite resolve.

But the cornerstone of the movie is the performance of first-time Korean actress Choi Seung-Yoon, as So-Young. Slender, almost fragile looking, she is the source of strength that her son, and the film rest on. She’s the epitome of the strength of a mother’s love, and a character that you will not soon forget.

In the larger sense, Riceboy Sleeps is also a movie about an experience common to many, the lives of immigrant families and how things change from one generation to the next.

But director Shim has taken that common experience, and made something that speaks to more universal themes, about finding our identity, about family, and about discovering that our true home, where our heart lives. It is not necessarily a place, but rather is in the people we love.

Riceboy Sleeps. Written and directed by Anthony Shim. Starring Choi Seung-Yoon, Ethan Hwang, Dohyun Noel Huang, and Anthony Shim. In theatres March 17.