Bong Joonho

I. Introduction

Bong Joon-ho is a South Korean film director, producer and screenwriter. The recipient of four Academy Awards, his filmography is characterised by emphasis on social themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden tone shifts.

II. Career

Bong was the youngest of four children. His father was a graphic designer and an art teacher, and his maternal grandfather was a noted novelist who had chosen to move to North Korea during the Korean War. When Bong was in elementary school, he moved with his family from Daegu to Seoul. He developed an interest in film while in secondary school. He then enrolled at Yonsei University, where he studied sociology and worked on the campus newspaper, drawing cartoons that supported the pro-democracy movement. After performing compulsory military service for two years, he graduated in 1993. He then enrolled at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, where he experienced all aspects of filmmaking. Bong spent the next several years contributing in various ways, mostly writing, to movies of other directors.

In 2000, Bong directed his first feature film, Flandersui gae (Barking Dogs Never Bite), about a university lecturer being driven mad by the barking of a neighbour’s dog. As he did for most of his subsequent movies, he cowrote the screenplay. The film received positive reviews but little notice. Salinui chueok (2003; Memories of Murder), based on a play about a series of real-life unsolved murders in the mid-1980s, was a major hit and won awards in several Korean film competitions. Bong then contributed to two anthology movies, notably Digital Short Films by Three Filmmakers 2004 (2004), for which he created a short mockumentary about a man’s downward spiral that was shot entirely on closed-circuit security cameras.

Bong’s next feature was the blockbuster Gwoemul (2006; The Host), a horror movie about a monster in the Han River that is terrorizing the residents of Seoul. It set box-office records in South Korea and was praised at the Cannes film festival. Madeo (2009; Mother) describes a mother’s attempt to prove her intellectually disabled son innocent of a murder that he appears to have committed. Snowpiercer (2013), an English-language movie based on a French graphic novel, won large international audiences as well as critical praise. It presented a sci-fi story in which the only people to survive a climate disaster live, separated by social class, on an enormous train. The movie features American actors Chris Evans, Ed Harris, and Octavia Spencer and British actors Tilda Swinton and John Hurt as well as Bong’s usual cast of Korean performers. It was later adapted as an American television series (2020– ).

Bong then addressed environmentalism and animal rights with Okja (2017), about a girl’s relationship with her giant genetically modified pig. It opened at Cannes, where it competed for the top award. Bong’s next film, the darkly comic horror movie Gisaengchung (2019; Parasite), took aim at the cruelty of social and financial inequity with a tale about a poor family that infiltrates a wealthy family by working as servants. Hailed by many critics as a masterpiece, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became the first foreign-language film to receive the Academy Award for best picture. It also earned the Oscar for best international feature, and Bong received Oscars for directing and for co-writing the screenplay.

III. Filmography

Year	Cover	Title
2000		Barking Dogs Never Bite
2003		Memories of Murder
2006		The Host
2009		Mother
2013		Snowpiercer
2017		Okja
2019		Parasite

IV. Awards