Parasite (Black&White)
Special black-and-white version of Bong Joon-ho’s winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
A glorious success and smashing box-office hit for Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho – who returns home after his foreign adventures in SNOWPIERCER and OKJA – PARASITE moves quickly from one genre to anotherBy the end of its 132-minute runtime, it will have cycled through social-realist drama, black comedy, social satire, home invasion thriller, and slapstick.
A story of class struggle, PARASITE dissects with surgical precision the life of two families of different social backgrounds. Ki-taek is the unemployed patriarch of a family of derelicts – his wife Chung-sook, his clever daughter Ki-jung, and his son Ki-woo – who live in an overcrowded, sordid basement. The Parks, on the other hand, live in a fabulous house with their teenage daughter Da-hye and terribly spoiled son Da-song. When, due to an unexpected stroke of luck, Ki-woo is hired by the Parks to be the private English tutor of Da-hye, the destinies of the two families cross. Their explosive meeting exposes the merciless evils of class inequalities, culminating in a powerful and utterly original outcome.
Bong shares a love of classic black-and-white films with his cinematographer, Hong Kyungpyo. His love for classic cinema dates back to his youth, when his mother wouldn’t allow him to visit the cinema for fear of ‘bacteria’, so he watched all the masterpieces at home on a black-and-white television. According to the director, the black-and-white version of PARASITE will give viewers an even stronger sense of contrast between the rich family and the poor.
PARASITE won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture, Directing, International Feature Film and Writing (Original Screenplay). It also became the first non-English language film in Oscar history to win the award for Best Picture.
Director Bong Joon-ho and his cameraman Hong Kyungpyo share a love for classic black and white films, so he presents a special black and white version of Parasite, which premiered at the IFFR. Bong Joon-ho was present at the film festival in Rotterdam, in his own words to watch films. A big compliment for the festival that screened its debut film Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000. This year the director also gave an inspiring masterclass at the IFFR, which you can look back here.