Bong Joon Ho firmly established himself at the vanguard of Korean filmmakers with his five feature films, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006) and Mother (2009), creating a global appetite for his English-language debut Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Memories of Murder dealt with a true-life serial murder case (which was solved only in 2019), shattering the conventions of the traditional crime-drama. The Host, in which a bizarre creature leaps out of the Han River and takes over the capital city of Seoul, terrified audiences worldwide upon its release and transformed the creature-feature with its massive scale and creativity. He shifted direction completely by delving into the insanity of the human mind in the psychological thriller Mother, featuring an elderly protagonist who sets out to find a savage killer, which won Best Performance by an Actress and nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2009 APSA ceremony. Snowpiercer incorporates elements of the action-thriller, with its unique setting of a post-apocalyptic super-train racing through icy landscapes in the near future as the last human survivors of a ravaged earth battle to survive under extreme circumstances. He followed this with Okja with its strong environmentalist themes about a young girl and her pet. In 2019, he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Parasite, which was also his second APSA nomination.

Accolades

Bong Joon-ho and Kwak Sin-ae and Moon Yang-kwon and Jang Young-hwan
Best Feature Film, 2019

Parasite (Gisaengchung)

Best Feature Film, 2019

Parasite (Gisaengchung)

Winner: Best Feature Film | 13th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, 2020 Ki-taek’s family of four is close, living in a basement apartment scrounging for unprotected…

More Details
Bong Joon-ho and Park Eun-Kyo
Best Screenplay, 2009

Bong Joon-ho and Park Eun-Kyo

Best Screenplay, 2009

Bong Joon-ho and Park Eun-Kyo

Mother (Madeo)

Writer/Director Bong Joon-ho studied sociology at the Yonsei University and graduated from the Korean Film Academy. By 1995 he made three short films: Memories in My…

More Details

Films

Parasite
2019

Parasite (Gisaengchung)

Republic of Korea
2019

Parasite (Gisaengchung)

Winner: Best Feature Film | 13th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, 2020 Ki-taek’s family of four is close, living in a basement apartment scrounging for unprotected…

More Details
Mother
2009

Mother (Madeo)

Republic of Korea
2009

Mother (Madeo)

Winner, Best Performance By An Actress, 2009 An unnamed widow lives alone with her only son, selling medicinal herbs in a small town in southern…

More Details

The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and emerging. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.