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CANNES (AFP) – South Korean Bong Joon-ho has confirmed his status as one of the greatest filmmakers in the world with his film won at the Cannes Film Festival for Parasite, a fabulously amusing moral tale about the growing gap between rich and poor.
This is the first international grand prize awarded to the makers of the highly acclaimed The Host (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013), who had been chosen by the critics for the Palme d'Or.
Bong's Stellar, as Lee Jeong-un and Song Kang-ho, as patriarch of a clan of scammers who capture a wealthy family, surprised spectators in Cannes.
The director called Song his "alter ego" and brought him on the scene while he was choosing
The Guardian praised Bong's thrilling black comedy, described as crooked "d & # 39; 39; Downton Abbey of modern times … that makes its mark on you ".
Yet, Bong, 49, with a soft voice hides his gift for biting social satire behind a soft exterior.
With a series of critics Bong is one of the best-known faces of South Korea, winning numerous awards at home and making a breakthrough in Hollywood – a rarity for an Asian writer.
But until now, important international prizes had escaped him
His police adventure produced by Netflix, Okja (2017), with Tilda Swinton, was a worldwide success after missing the Palme d & # 39; Gold at Cannes in 2017.
Once Quentin Tarantino had equated "Steven Spielberg to his heyday", the director is part of the first wave of South Korean filmmakers to flourish after total democratization in the late 1980s, opening the door to a cultural renaissance.
His contemporaries in this golden Korean generation Park Chan-wook, famous director of the film Cannes Old Boy, Old Boy, 2004, and the erotic thriller The Handmaiden (2016).
Bong reportedly participated in street protests as a sociology student at Yonsei's elite university, Seoul, during the 1980s, the country's pro-democracy movement had already declared to an interviewer that he had been arrested for using gasoline bombs.
This anger rages through Parasite, which Variety's Jessica Kiang calls "a big tick with the bitter blood of clbad rage."
She says, "Bong's brilliant film is undeniably extremely furious, and he's recording because the target is so deserving, so huge, so 2019. "
Bong was an energetic supporter of freedom of expression and an opponent of ordinary political pressure on artists from his country. His activism saw him placed among more than 10,000 artists who were blacklisted for criticizing the former deposed president, Park Geun-hye.
But it is his masterly and humorous depictions of South Korean society, delivered with a wealth of cinematic allegories, that have marked
His Memories Of Murder – a 2003 feature film based on series of serial murders who shook the nation in the 1980s – was viewed as a metaphor for the repressive society of military domination.
The film – He also praised his black humor – swept all the awards of national cinema and is often cited by critics as one of the top 10 South Korean films ever made.
His huge 2006 blockbuster, The Host, portrays an incompetent government left helpless in the country. awakening from a disaster. In 2014, a parallel between the movie and the sinking of the Seoul ferry had cost the death of 300 of them, mostly schoolchildren.
Mother – a 2009 thriller about too protective mother of a mentally handicapped boy suspected of murder – also won a resounding success. [19659002] The host and the mother were shown in Cannes, the latter cementing Bong's reputation and he was quickly overwhelmed by offers from foreign directors.
Bong's first American project, Snowpiercer, featured Hollywood heavyweights, including Captain America star Chris Evans and Swinton.
This film – about a peasant woman trying to save a genetically modified beast from an avid multinational – has also sparked debates about industrial farming and the brutality of animal exploitation.
"Many people call me a great satirist, but I do not think I had a choice as a South Korean director," Bong told Agence France-Presse last year.
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