Film · Around the world
born 1969 · South Korean
New Korean Cinema
Bong Joon-ho directs genre films that refuse to stay inside their genre: a monster movie that is really about official incompetence, a detective story with no solution, a class satire that turns into a home invasion. In 2020 his Parasite became the first film not in English to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the first film since 1955 to take both the Palme d'Or and Best Picture. Almost everything he makes is, underneath, about inequality.
Two provincial detectives in the 1980s beat and guess their way through South Korea's first serial murder case, and the film ends with an unanswered stare into the camera (2003)
Memories of Murder — based on the Hwaseong murders, unsolved until a confession in 2019.
A mutant creature crawls out of the Han River in broad daylight and carries off a snack-stall owner's daughter (2006)
The Host — the monster is blamed on chemicals dumped by the US military, from a real 2000 incident.
A woman sets out to clear her learning-disabled son of a schoolgirl's murder, and dances alone on a coach at the end (2009)
Mother — with Kim Hye-ja, cast against her image as Korea's archetypal television mum.
The last humans circle a frozen Earth on a train where the poor at the back eat protein blocks and fight their way forward, carriage by carriage (2013)
Snowpiercer — from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige; Bong fought Harvey Weinstein over cuts.
A poor family talk their way one by one into jobs with a rich one, until they discover what is living under the house (2019)
Parasite — Palme d'Or 2019 and four Academy Awards including Best Picture.
A girl in the Korean mountains tries to stop a corporation taking back the enormous genetically engineered pig she has raised (2017)
Okja — a Netflix production booed at Cannes for having no theatrical release.
An 'expendable' worker on an ice planet is cloned each time he dies, until two copies of him exist at once (2025)
Mickey 17 — from Edward Ashton's novel, with Robert Pattinson; premiered at the Berlinale.