Director Bong Joon Ho Went Insular to Gain Universal Appeal

Away from news of an impeached president acquitted by his senate, locusts swarming food supplies in Africa and other disaster events of the week, the Oscars on Sunday quietly triggered a seismic geopolitical shift by awarding director Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" the first Best Picture award given to a film in a non-English language. Bong Joon Ho, in his acceptance speeches, achieved a blending of cultures no American-born or native-English-speaker director could have: he made the case for insularity, which some might call nativism or even "nationalism".

Ho said at the post-Oscars presser he'd collaborated with American filmmakers and actors on a past project called "Okja". But for his Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" he stuck closer to subjects and characters familiar to him. Ho even released his film to English-speaking film festivals with spoken Korean dialog and an all-Korean cast of actors. The choice showed audiences around the world the occasional English phrases sprinkled into speech spoken in other languages.

Reporter: People when they talk about co-productions they say it's difficult to do Hollywood co-productions with Korea or China or Asian cultures because the stories are different and they don't communicate as well. How were you able to grasp the universality of the story and translate it in a way that everybody could react to it?

Bong Joon Ho [translated from Korean]: So my previous film Okja was a coproduction between Korea and the U.S. but Parasite which is a purely Korean film, has garnered more enthusiasm from audiences all over the world. And that's making me think that perhaps the deeper I delve into things that are around me the broader the story can become and the more appeal it can have to an international audience.
The most poignant moment of the night was not the biggest award going to "Parasite" Best Picture. Rather it was Ho's acceptance speech for Best Director, wherein he attributed, through his translator, a quote he learned in film school that he etched "deep into my heart" that "the most personal is the most creative."

Ho next broke briefly into English to tell the Oscar audience the quote originated from "our great Martin Scorsese". The industry soon turned their back to Ho and gave Scorsese a standing ovation. The American director, who was also nominated for Best Director, has not just made film but championed aspiring filmmakers, the movie form itself, and has given away trade secrets in the form of media literacy curriculum for high school students so they could enjoy films without being manipulated.


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Further Reading:

"A tiny South Korean hedge fund that invested around $500,000 in Parasite, a film about class conflict and social inequality, hit the jackpot after the dark comedy became the first foreign-language film in history to win the Oscar for Best Picture."   thedailybeast.com





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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