Bong Joon-ho

Bong Joon-ho (봉준호; born September 14, 1969) is an Academy Award winning South Korean film director and screenwriter. He garnered international acclaim for his second feature film, the crime drama Memories of Murder (2003), before achieving commercial success with his subsequent films, the black comedy monster movie The Host (2006) and the dystopian sci-fi Snowpiercer (2013), both of which are among the highest-grossing films of all time in South Korea.

Two of his films have screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival—Okja, which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and Parasite, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. He became the first Korean director to win the Palme d'Or. Parasite also won Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Golden Globe Awards, with Bong also receiving nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay for his work. Upon being nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, Parasite became the first South Korean film to receive an Academy Award nomination in any category; for his work on the film, Bong received Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film, and Best Picture, becoming the first Asian filmmaker to receive all four awards for one film. Bong is the fifth Asian filmmaker following Hiroshi Teshigahara, Akira Kurosawa, M. Night Shyamalan, and Ang Lee to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, the second to win after Lee, and the first South Korean filmmaker nominated for an Academy Award.

In 2017, Metacritic ranked Bong sixteenth on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century. His films feature social themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden mood shifts.

In 2020, his film Parasite broke numerous records at the 92nd Academy Awards. Bong tied the record of most wins in a single night (4) with Walt Disney who set the record in 1953, and the only person to win four awards for a single film. Parasite was also the first film to win under the newly named Best International Film award and was the first non-English film to win Best Picture.

• From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bong_Joon-ho_, accessed 10 February 2020.