South Korean master filmmaker Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Memories of Murder) delivers an unpredictable comic suspense thriller with his Palme d’Or and Academy Award-winning film, Parasite.
The Kims, a poor family of four, reside in a cramped basement apartment where they struggle to make ends meet, stealing nearby Wi-Fi signals and folding pizza boxes for a delivery joint to make money under the table. Sick of their underclass existence, they set their sights on the Parks, a rich family looking for an English tutor for their teenaged daughter. The crafty Kims plot and scheme, and soon infiltrate the affluent home one-by-one, each of them manipulating their way into household gigs without the Parks realizing that they’re related. However, once they’re settled in, things don’t go according to plan, and simmering class tensions are not so easily suppressed.
Bong contrasts and skewers these two family units while casting a critical gaze at the system that pits them against one another. Darkly funny and palpably urgent, Parasite is a universal tale of economic disparity, social polarization, and human desperation that does not fit conveniently into any one simple category: it is a satire, tragedy, and allegory all at once and not least a supreme entertainment.
Sunday’s screening will be introduced by filmmaker and lecturer William Brown and is the first in our third season of Pantheon titles, celebrating the Greatest Films Ever Made. Along with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Parasite was the most recent release to break the top 100 in the legendary poll of film scholars published once a decade by Sight & Sound magazine, coming in at #90.
Guest speaker William Brown (Assistant Professor of Film, UBC, D.Phil. University of Oxford)
William joined UBC from the University of Roehampton, London, in January 2022, having previously taught at the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford and New York University Abu Dhabi. He is both a scholar and a maker of films, with work spanning fiction, documentary, the video-essay and hybrids of all three.
Bong Joon-ho
Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong
South Korea
2019
In Korean with English subtitles
Best Film, Academy Award; Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won
Cinematography
Hong Kyung Pyo
Editor
Yang Jinmo
Original Music
Jung Jae Il
Production Design
Lee Ha Jun
Also in This Series
Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)
The crowning glory of classical French cinema, this sumptuous melodrama brings to life the early 19th century Boulevard du Crime in Paris, where popular audiences for mime shows and carnival rub shoulders with wealthy patrons of classical theatre.
The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)
The Mexico/Texas borderlands, 1913: Pike (William Holden) leads his gang of aging outlaws on a foray south for one last hurrah. Peckinpah's masterpiece, a savage lament for men who believe in nothing but find respect by dying in vain.
The Ascent
During the darkest winter of WWII, two Soviet partisans venture through the backwoods of Belarus in search of food, always at risk of falling into enemy hands. In her masterpiece Larisa Shepitko zeroes in on profound spiritual and philosophical themes.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.
I Am Cuba
Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba features some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed. A euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and revolutionary cinema.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.