Friday, May 08, 2015

The Auteurs #44: Bong Joon-ho




One of the figures of a movement in the late 1990s/early 2000s known as the Korean New Wave, Bong Joon-ho is a filmmaker that is known for making dark films that refused to be defined into any genre. Never wanting to pigeon himself from making one particular type of film, Joon-ho would reinvent himself by going into one genre and then into another. Even as he is someone who is willing to find some glimmer of hope in worlds that are very dark and complicated. While he’s only made a small number of films so far in his career, he is one of international cinema’s most exciting filmmakers working today.

Born on September 14, 1969 in Daegu, South Korea, Bong Joon-ho was part of a revered family in South Korea as his grandfather was a noted author and his father was a designer. Through his family, Joon-ho would become interested in the world of film as he already made up his mind to become a filmmaker at a young age as he would become part of a film club during the late 1980s as a sociology student at Yonsei University. Through the films of Edward Yang, Shohei Imamura, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Joon-ho would craft his own ideas into film projects upon attending the Korean Academy of Film Arts in the early 1990s. It was during that time where Joon-ho would create his own short films in 16mm as one of them in Incoherence (which can be seen here) as it would get him work writing screenplays for other filmmakers and work as an assistant director for some of these films.

More can be read here at Cinema Axis.

© thevoid99 2015

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