"The Host" and Bong Joon-Ho at IFC Center on Feb. 26th & 27th 2007

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Category: Featured Events

Special screening press release (source: Korea Society)

A mini-festival on the maximal career of South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho will take place at the IFC Center on February 26 and 27. A special line-up of Bong’s signature cinema—black comedies, gritty and ubercool crime dramas and sci-fi thrillers with a manhwa feel—will kick off with showings of Incoherence, Sink and Rise, Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder.

On February 27, Bong, a fast-rising star across the Pacific, will attend the closing screening of his latest film, The Host, and an informal director’s Q&A afterwards. 

 

 

Bong Joon-Ho is a South Korean film director and screenwriter, born in 1969. After graduating from Yonsei University majoring in sociology, Bong, Jun-ho made his first 6mm short film, White Man in 1993, and won an award at Shin-young Teenager Film Festival. After working as an assistant director for the film Motel Cactus by Park Ki-yong(1997), he made his feature film debut with Barking Dogs Never Bites (2000). In 2003, he made his second feature film, Memories of Murder, which won the Best Director Price (Concha de Plata) in San Sebastian Film Festival.

Films:
The Host
2006, 35mm, color, Showbox & Magnolia Films, 119 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Song Kang- Ho, Park Hae-Il, Bae Du-Na, Byeon Hie-Bong, Ko Ah-Sung

Synopsis: Toxins from a U.S military base flow into Korea’s Han River, causing the birth of a mutant creature which terrorizes Seoul. When it grabs a little girl, her dysfunctional family must band together to save her. The Host is like a mutant hybrid spawned from the improbable union of Little Miss Sunshine and Godzilla, for the film is a family comedy and political satire in which an unnaturally evolved tadpole just happens to loom (very) large. Bong expertly balances absurd humor against tense thrills, and domestic drama against mass mayhem, reasserting South Korea's place at the pinnacle of genre-busting cinema - and most of all he surprises at every turn in a film where, despite a realistic social milieu, almost anything seems possible.

Awards:
Best Director, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Film, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Sound, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best CG, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Picture, 5th Korean Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
New York Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
DHL Audience Choice Award For Best Feature, Hawaii International Film Festival
Pusan International Film Festival
Best Special Effects and Orient Express Award for Best Asian Film, Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia (Spain) 2006


Memories of Murder
2003, 35mm, color, CJ Entertainment & Palm Pictures, 127 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Song Kang-Ho, Kim Sang-Kyung, Park Hae-Il

 

Synopsis:

South Korea was rocked to its foundations when struck by its first serial killer, who raped and murdered ten women in a small village in Kyonggi Province between 1986 and 1991. Director Bong Joon-Ho (Barking Dogs Never Bite) has taken the investigation and combined it with best-of-career performances from Song Kang-Ho (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) and Kim Sang-Kyung (Turning Gate), to make Korea's most highly-acclaimed film of 2003, a master work that is itself like a memory of a dream: heartbreaking, mysterious, stunningly beautiful, and unspeakably sad.  
A comedy, of sorts, of procedural errors that would be hilarious were it not so tragic, the film is a haunting look at a nation finding itself inevitably slipping back to an earlier, uglier era when an authoritarian government could freely violate the rights of private citizens in the name of the law. 

Awards:
Best Film, Grand Bell Awards
Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Grand Bell Awards
Best Director (Bong Joon-Ho), Grand Bell Awards
Silver Seashell, San Sebastian International Film Festival
Fipresci Prize, San Sebastian International Film Festival
Best New Director (Bong Joon-Ho), San Sebastian International Film Festival 2003
Asian Film Award, Tokyo International Film Festival
Grand Prix, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Premiere Award, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Prix Mediatheques, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Special Prize of the Police, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Best Screenplay Award, Audience Award, Torino Film Festival (Italy), 2003.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)
2000, 35mm, color, Mirovision, 106 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Bae Du-Na, Lee Sung-Jae

Synopsis:
American Beauty hopped up on laughing gas, Barking Dogs Never Bite’s plot is choreographed as intricately as a triple-time minuet. Its director says it's about corruption and innocence (and it is), but the story plays as a wild comedy focusing on two of the greatest characters to appear onscreen in decades: Lee Sung-Jae, a part-time lecturer who learns he'll do anything to achieve a coveted position as a professor and Bae Doo-Na, a female member of an apartment building's custodial staff who yearns to do something brave. A shaggy-dog story about the mysteries of pregnancy, the length of toilet paper, lost dogs, and good stew, this movie is a bedtime story for urban sophisticates, scored to a be-bop soundtrack. The director's debut feature, and one of the few independent Korean films, it gleefully mixes razor-sharp acting, goofy physicality, black comedy, and genuine warmth. It's the kind of movie that audiences live for, and that gives marketing departments nightmares.  

Awards:
Best Editing, Slamdance Film Festival 2001
International Film Critics Federation Award of Young Asian filmmakers, 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival
Special award presented to composer Cho Sung-Woo for his soundtrack for Barking Dogs Never Bite, Buenos Aires International Film Festival (Argentina) 2001.
Best Newcomer Award to Producer Cho Min-hwan for Barking Dogs Never Bite, Munich Film Fest (Germany) 2001

Sink And Rise (from Twentidentity )
2004, Digi-beta, color, 95 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Twentidentity is a 20-part omnibus film made by alumni of the Korean Academy of Film Arts, on the occasion of the school's 20th anniversary. Bong's contribution is Sink and Rise, a whimsical work set alongside the Han River that can be seen as a warm up for the director's third feature The Host.

Incoherence (1994)
1994, Digi-Beta, color, 30 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
In 1996, his short graduation film, Incoherence, a black comedy that criticized society with his unique sense of humor, was invited to international film festivals, the San Diego and Hong Kong Film Festivals, giving Bong recognition and a rise to fame.