Bong Joon-ho and VIFF go back a long way. Tony Rayns programmed his short film Memories in My Frame in 1994 and invited Bong to attend as a guest with another short, Incoherence, a year later. Tony continued to champion his work until everybody else in the world fell into line (which didn’t take all that long as it turned out).
In fact, all seven of Bong’s features have screened at the festival, barring Snowpiercer, which we ran at the VIFF Centre, and Bong himself has been back a couple of times in various capacities.
It’s been gratifying to see him establish himself not only as the preeminent South Korean director of his era (The Host remains the most popular Korean film ever made), but as one of the key filmmakers of our time, an artist keenly attuned to the forces around us – class inequality, institutional failure, corporate and individual avarice and arrogance, environmental crises, the sheer, terrifying stupidity of the world – but who isn’t about to let any of us off the hook.
His movies are sharply satirical, violent, high concept, and yet, somehow, irrefutably human. One minute we’re laughing at these fools and dunderheads on screen, the next, we’re choking back the shock of recognition.
Our complete retrospective of all seven of Bong’s features also includes a symposium across the weekend, January 18-19, with presentations from half a dozen expert speakers. Discover the symposium schedule and speaker line-up by following the links to each film below.
Bong 1-7 Symposium: Jan 18 & 19
Join us for a weekend of expert talks and screenings of all 7 films
Memories of Murder
Parasite director Bong Joon-ho's police procedural is the centrepiece of our retrospective and arguably his masterpiece. Certainly, among serial killer movies this one is on a par with Zodiac and The Silence of the Lambs, but more politically astute.
Barking Dogs Never Bite
Bong's first film is a genial black comedy involving the deaths -- accidental and otherwise -- of several dogs in a Seoul apartment complex. Saturday's screening will be followed by a talk by Distinguished Professor Dal Yong Jin.
Snowpiercer
In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a bullet train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.
